Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
May
13, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
Law 'n Order in La Paz: All Quiet
on the Southern Front?
May
12, 2004
Blanton
/ Kornbluh
Prisoner Abuse: Cheney Warned in
1992
Virginia
Tilley
So, Who's to Blame?
Bruce
Jackson
James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator
of Them All
Thomas
P. Healy
No Enemies: Making Peace with Bert Sacks
Linda
S. Heard
Racism and Ignorance: a Lethal Cocktail in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
Spinning Torturegate
Lisa
Viscidi
The People's Voice: Community Radio in Guatemala
Jack
Heyman
View from the Bay Bridge: Longshoremen Plan Mass Workers March
on DC
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Rummy's Reprieve
CounterPunch
Wire
Teamsters Corruption Scandal: Hoffa Exec. Assistant Alleged to
Have Quashed Investigation into Mob Influence
Christopher
Brauchli
Detention Camp, USA
William
S. Lind
Bush's Waterloo?
May 11, 2004
Mark
Engler
On the "Necessity" of Torture
Ray
McGovern
More Troops? A March of Folly
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment
Mickey
Z.
Less Than Hero
Christopher
Reed
Torture on the Homefront: America's Long History of Prison Abuse
Dennis
Hans
When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar
Bruce
Jackson
Pete Seeger at 85
Mike
Whitney
Killing al Sadr
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Shrinking the Guatemalan Military
William
A. Cook
The Unconscious Country: Righteous Indignation,
Nakedly Displayed
May
10, 2004
Robert
Fisk
From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib: Racism
and Torture as Entertainment
Wayne
Madsen
The Israeli Torture Template: Rape,
Feces and Urine-Soaked Cloth Sacks
Col.
Dan Smith
The Shame of Abu Ghraib
Joe
Bageant
John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife!
Ron
Jacobs
Rummy's Prisongate Blues: Don't Leave Mad; Just Leave
Ben
Tripp
Getting in Touch with Your Inner Savage
Ray
Hanania
Why They Hate Us: Racism, Bigotry and Abuse
Reza
Fiyouzat
"Mishandled" Invasions
Diane
Christian
Images & Abstractions &
Genitals
Website
of the Day
Crushing Iraqi Skulls with Tanks for Sport?
May
8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
May
7, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention
Facilities in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ahmad
Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien
Phu
Alexander
Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison)
Bell?
Mike
Whitney
The Price of Victory
Norman
Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial
M.
Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
Website
of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq
May
4, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations
and Responses
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture
David
Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq
Barry
Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers
Patrick
Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised
Dr.
Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say
Fidel
Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War
Mike
Whitney
Empire of Torture
Sonali
Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against
John Kerry
Josh
Frank
The Lost Sierra Club
Stan
Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq
Agustin
Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics
Stew
Albert
American Know-How
Website
of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up
May
3, 2004
Virginia
Tilley
Let the Wall of Silence Fall
May
1 / 2, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
An Army in Disgrace, a Policy
in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat
Robert
Fisk
"Good Guys" Who Can Do No
Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders,
Useless Spies, Angry World
Heather
Williams
Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin
American Troops Flee Iraq
Diane
Rejman
An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq:
Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
Diane
Christian
Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and
Sharon Speak the Same Language
Patrick
Cockburn
Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked,
Shocked, Shocked
Chris
Floyd
Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists
and Annihilation
April
29 / 30, 2004
Dave
Zirin
A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome
Death of Pat Tillman
Kathy
Kelly
The Warden's Tour
Greg
Weiher
Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the
Banality of Evil
Michael
S. Ladah
Terrorism and Assassination: the
Ultimate Depception
Patrick
Cockburn
The Fallujah Mutinies
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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May
13, 2004
"We Created
Terror Among the Arabs"
The Deir Yassin
Massacre
By WILLIAM MARTIN
On April 9, 1948, members of the underground
Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin,
who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered
the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men,
women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies
down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations.
The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern
Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin
as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the
Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The
Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the
Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.
The massacre at Deir Yassin
was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped
corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time
98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker
trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee
and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time,
"We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages
around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."
From about 1938 on to the founding
of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly
assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung
their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the
Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing
97 British civil servants. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also
assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte,
in 1948.
But Deir Yassin was not the
only massacre by the Israeli Defense Force. That army, under
Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma,
located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents,
and threw their bodies into pits. "The children were killed
by breaking their heads with sticks ... The remaining Arabs were
then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed
..." (Nur Masalha, The Historical Roots of the Palestinian
Refugee Question).
We read further. According
to Yitzhak Rabin's biography:
We walked outside, Ben-Gurion
accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: "What is to
be done with the population?" BG waved his hand in a gesture,
which said: Drive them out! ... I agreed that it was essential
to drive the inhabitants out.
Continuing the narrative, Ben-Gurion
University historian Benny Morris writes in "Operation Dani
and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948",
Middle East Journal, 40
At 13.30 hours on 12 July [1948]...
Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, operation Dani head Operation,
issued the following order: '1. The inhabitants of Lydda must
be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be
directed to Beit Nabala,... Implement Immediately.' A similar
order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning
the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Ramle, occupied by
Kiryati troops that morning... On 12 and 13 July, the Yaftah
brigades carried out their orders, expelling the 50-60,000 remaining
inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around the two towns....
About noon on 13 July, Operation
Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: 'Lydda police
fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants....
Lydda's inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab
legion lines; many of Ramle's inhabitants were ferried in trucks
or buses. Clogging the roads... the tens of thousands of refugees
marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way.
It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh
Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died
in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness
described the spoor: the refugee column 'to begin with [jettisoned]
utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women,
and children.
There were many other such
villages with Arabic names that have almost been expunged from
memory--but not quite. These facts have always been known to
some historians, however they have been consistently denied by
the official Israeli histories, as, indeed, Israel has never
taken any responsibility for the exodus of Palestinians from
the land of the present state of Israel.
Within the last 10 to 20 years,
however, there has been an exponential increase in historical
studies of the origins of the state of Israel which have coincided
with the release by Israel of many, but not all, of the historical
and military archives. Ben-Gurion University historian Benny
Morris, as well as others, have systematically mined these documents
and found numerous instances of massacres, and, by the way, not
one shred of evidence for the frequently repeated official Israeli
lie that the Palestinians fled Palestine because the surrounding
Arab states told them to.
In fact, according to UN estimates,
which some say are conservative, 750,000 Palestinians fled the
site of the present Jewish state in 1948. Those refugees and
their descendents now number about 4.5 million and constitute
the largest and longest standing refugee population in the world.
Many live in squalid refugee camps distributed in the surrounding
Arab states or in the West Bank or Gaza, many retain the titles
to their land, recognized by the British before 1948 or the Ottomans
before that , and many retain the keys to their front doors of
their former homes in what is now Israel, whether or not those
doors still exists.
The '67 War generated a second
wave of about 300,000 refugees from the West Bank and Gaza who
were either expelled through direct or psychological methods
or fled the Israel aerial attacks on the territories which included
the extensive use of napalm.
The reader is invited to read
the Hagana's Plan
D , which has been available in English since the 1960s and
was a military strategy of 1948 that entailed the evacuation
of the Palestinian population from the areas of a future Jewish
state.
Those who invoke the suicide
bombings against mostly Israeli civilians to infer the righteousness
of the Israeli cause live in a twilight of psychic denial of
an otherwise unambiguous historical record: the state of Israel
was founded on terrorism and ethnic cleansing.
The suicide bombings inside
Israel, the first of which only occurred in 1994, after 25 years
of occupation, is only a side show. That is a symptom and long
way from the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There will never be a solution
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until Israel takes responsibility,
under U.N. Resolution 194, calling for reparation of the Palestinian
refugees, and recognizes the immense suffering it caused at that
time. We need also to recognize the US is giving unqualified
moral support to a state that is based on racial purity and one
that is intrinsically expansionist.
William James Martin is a visiting Instructor of Mathematics
at the University of Central Florida, Orlando. He can be reached
at: martinw@email.unc.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for May 8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
|