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April 10, 2002
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
April 8, 2002
David
Vest
From
Birmingham to Nashville:
The Making of Tammy Wynette
Rick Giombetti
Paxil, Suicide and Science
Dr. Neve
Gordon
Letter
to an IDF Colonel:
How Did You Become
a War Criminal?
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's Top 10 CDs
Jordy
Cummings
Not
in My Name Anymore
Gavin Keeney
Bush and the Middle East:
Mouth Wide Shut
Edward
Said
The
Future of Palestine
April 7, 2002
Beth Daoud
Accompanying Ambulances
in Bethlehem
Nancy
Stohlman
After
the Invasion:
The Search for Bread
Among the Ruins
Thomas Mountain
"Yellow Peril" In Hawai'i:
Judge Orders Chains and Shackles for Chinese Witnesses
Tariq
Ali
Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?
April 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
War, Snake Oil and Circuses
Viktor
Litovkin
Russian
Generals Raise Questions About Pentagon Victories in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
CIA Survey of Iraqi Airfields
May Herald Attack
Walt Brasch
Oil
Slick George:
Bush-whacking the Environment
Ralph Nader
Campaign Finance Sham
Sam Bahour
The
Blind Leading the Criminal
Bill Christison:
A Former CIA Official on
Oil and the Middle East
April 5, 2002
Charmaine
Seitz
In
Ramallah: The Grueling Reoccupation Grinds On
Nancy Stohlman
The Invasion of Bethlehem
and Our Tax Dollars at Work
Beth Daoud
The
Siege of Bethlehem:
"What Do You Mean God Is Punishing Me?"
Fareed Marjaee:
Demonizing Iran
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Philip
Morris to Canada:
"Drop Dead"
Alex Lynch
Tampa Campus Mirrors
Middle East Strife
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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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
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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April 10, 2002
A Tale of Two Warring Tribes
By Doreen Miller
It's an age-old story of sibling rivalry and a
senseless, ongoing, bloody feud whose roots extend so far back
into history that members of the present generation no longer
remember why the fighting started in the first place, or at what
point disagreements turned into blinding hatred and murderous
rage. These tribes hail from the same ancestral lineage which
somewhere along the line ended up splitting off into three factions:
Muslims, Christians, and Jews. All three of these tribes proclaim
to be descendants of Abraham, their religious father and patriarch.
All three are guilty of unspeakable crimes against one another.
The mutual wholesale slaughter committed
by the children of Abraham throughout history is based upon a
profound misinterpretation and subsequent misapplication of the
ancient adage, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."
Over the centuries, many people have
used this phrase in the name of religion and self-defense as
"justification" for murder and war; however, this principle
does not sanction the practice of vengeance. Rather, it merely
states and points to the basic spiritual law of karma which Buddhists
have recognized and taught for thousands of years: That which
you do unto others shall return to you in full and equal measure.
The present-day, escalating violence
between the Israelis and Palestinians is, in light of its greater
historical context, clearly a mindless, unquestioned continuation
of thousands of years of "bad blood" and misguided
justification for revenge between them.
Each group lays sole and exclusive claim
to common ancestral lands and cities by reason of being God's
"chosen people" and hence does not recognize "the
other" as equally entitled heirs.
In fact, each side fails to see "the
other" as human beings at all. Individuals of both camps
condemn the murderous acts of the other as "terrorist"
while reserving use of the less offensive term "self-defense"
as a rationale for carrying out their own brutal acts of inhumanity.
For the past thirty-seven years, the
Palestinian people have suffered occupation, humiliation, and
human rights abuses at the hands of the Israelis. They have seen
their homes and businesses expropriated, their lands seized and
built up with illegal Israeli settlements, their mosques burned,
and their holy places desecrated.
They have been held hostage and prisoners
in their own land, denied freedom of movement and self-autonomy
by a ruling power that has defiantly ignored and blatantly disobeyed
UN resolutions handed down since 1967 that address the occupied
territories and the proper treatment of Palestinians.
As a people who have lost all sense of
moral leadership and direction, the Palestinians, in turn, have
chosen to sink to the level of their oppressors by essentially
handing over their sons and daughters to the influence of extremist
militant groups where they are sacrificed on the altar of "martyrdom"
by means of the despicable crime of suicide bombings.
They may have mistakenly hoped to subdue
their sense of despair, anguish and misery in the form of "due
justice" and "wake-up calls" to unsuspecting,
innocent Israeli civilians.
Unfortunately, this myopic approach neglects
to take into account that like begets like and that the use of
violence can only breed more of the same. Rather than awakening
the common Israeli to champion their cause, that of liberation,
they have instead initiated a whole new cycle of retaliatory
killing and violence and are now reaping the wrath of a powerful,
merciless U.S. supported Israeli army.
In the past 18 months, Israelis have
killed more than 1,200 Palestinians, including over 120 paramedics.
They have savagely attacked and sacrilegiously ravished Palestinian
refugee camps, places that by their very definition are meant
to provide safe haven for a persecuted people.
In their reign of terror, Israeli soldiers
blew up electric transmission lines in these camps - cutting
off electricity to over 20,000 civilians - deliberately destroyed
drinking water supply lines and rooftop water tanks, forcefully
entered households, wantonly smashed furniture and property,
and even used the inhabitants of these camps - mostly women,
children, and elderly - as human shields.
There have been reports that Israeli
soldiers stormed and ransacked Ramallah's Arab Care Hospital
terrorizing patients there. A Dutch volunteer paramedic, shocked
in disbelief at what he witnessed, equated their actions to Nazi
war crimes. Other reliable foreign press releases report how
Israeli soldiers have blocked emergency medical vehicles from
reaching and treating the wounded, even to the point of arresting
five emergency service drivers.
The prevailing Israeli attitude of "take
no prisoners" has lead to the capture and summary, Nazi-style
execution of ordinary Palestinian police officers as well as
members of Arafat's elite guard found within his compound. They
have even gone so far as to shoot at international peace demonstrators,
wounding seven. All of the aforementioned actions by Israeli
soldiers constitute an unequivocal perpetration of war crimes
under international law.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Bush, fully
engulfed in justifying his own sanctioned U.S. killings of thousands
of innocent Afghan civilians in his "war against terror,"
chooses to see only Sharon's side of the "self-defense"
equation by placing full blame of this horrendous situation squarely
on the shoulders of Arafat.
Bush remains uncommitted to attempting
to fully understand and recognize the connection of the recently
intensified suicide missions to the unbearably inhumane and long-term
"imprisonment" and demoralizing subjugation of the
Palestinian people by Israel.
His demonization of Arafat and the Palestinians
is most likely an attempt to hide the fact that U.S. weapons
($2 billion annually) supplied to Israel are being used against
an oppressed and, for the most part, defenseless people.
To question Sharon's violent military
response to supposedly "unprovoked" yet nonetheless
inexcusable terrorist acts would be to delegitimize America's
own shower of death rained down upon innocent Afghans in our
hunt for Osama who quite suddenly no longer appears to be a concern.
To suggest that Arafat is somehow directly
giving orders to carry out these bombing missions in order to
undermine the peace process is ludicrous. Those who utter such
an allegation are in total denial of the fact that he has become,
in reality, a powerless leader.
He has proven himself unable to control
or stop the fundamentalist groups responsible for these suicide
bombing missions which seem to have taken on a life of their
own ever since Sharon stopped the peace negotiations in 2001
and began trying to cow the Palestinians into submission through
the use of violent military tactics. Even if Israel were to find
a way to carry out their proposal to exile Arafat, they would
find the violence against them unabated.
Seeking to place blame on one side or
the other is absolutely fruitless at this point. Both share equally
in the culpability for the senseless bloodshed and wanton destruction
of lives and property committed by one against the other.
It is obvious these two tribes of Abraham
are so deeply mired in their hatred for one another that they
could never be able to reach any form of compromise for peaceful
coexistence on their own. Some sort of non-partisan, parental
authority figure needs to step in, separate these adolescent,
warring children, and teach them how to tolerate and respect
one another as dignified human beings with equal rights.
What is needed is an international UN
peacekeeping force, culled from a wide variety of nations, that
would occupy both countries, secure law and order, and reestablish
some semblance of normalcy and sanity.
This presence should remain as long as
necessary until a final and definitive peace plan - one that
recognizes the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis to form
self-autonomous countries with well-defined, respected borders
- has been worked out and proven itself to be successfully implemented.
Only then will the Middle East finally attain its presently elusive,
yet long-desired peace.
Doreen Miller
writes for YellowTimes.
She encourages your comments: dmiller@YellowTimes.org
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