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April 9, 2002
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
April 2, 2002
Uri Avnery
Murdering Arafat?
Jeff Chang
Is
Protest Music Dead?
Lev Grinberg
Israel's State Terrorism
Norman
Madarasz
Bullying
Brazil
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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Read Whiteout and Find Out
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
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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April 9, 2002
Memories of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
By Vijay Prashad
The Israeli Defense Force continues its inhuman
assault on the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories,
sometimes euphemistically called the Palestinian Authority. The
Oslo Accords that produced this sham of freedom did not change
the fundamental relationship between the Israeli state and the
Palestinian people - one of colonial domination in all aspects
of life. What the PA had, as most reasonable commentators accepted,
was the right to manage only a short list of subjects, in a sense
similar to most of the comprador regimes that worked under the
heel of the colonial master.
But people with a long history of struggle,
who chaff at the bit placed on them by the US and the Israeli
state, staff the PA. From the standpoint of the Israeli state,
any motion on their part is tantamount to terrorism. When all
reasonable opposition is squashed, what else must come but the
suicide bomber? The  suicide bomber is not a result
of some malady in Palestinian or Islamic culture, but it is the
end result of an ill-fated policy since 1967 to render the Palestinians
without the means to craft their destiny. This is not to say
that the Israeli people deserve what they get. Far from it, it
is to say that Sharonism produced the terrible social conditions
that led to this impasse.
And we hear NPR and other sources of
liberal commentary flog the tired horse of Arafat being soft
on terrorism. These liberals are heirs to Jimmy Carter, who said,
early in 1980, "Any attempt to take control of the Gulf
will be seen as an attack against the interests of the US, and
will be resisted by any means, including military force."
Palestinian assertion is, in this view, an assault on the Gulf.
Meanwhile, as the IDF continues its barrage
in Nablus and elsewhere, the calendar brings us to the two decade
anniversary of Sharonism's worst crime: the massacre at Sabra
and Shatila. How will we grieve those fifteen thousand dead because
of Sharonism in September 1982, when so much more bloods flows
from the streets of Ramallah to Tel Aviv even today? What is
the point of those memories of barbarism, when barbarity continues
unchecked?
Sharonism begins on 9 April 1948, when
Menachem Begin's Irgun massacred two hundred and fifty-four residents
of Deir Yassin massacre. Begin only followed the racist callousness
of Israel's first President Chaim Weizmann who said that the
British informed him, "There are a few hundred thousand
Negroes [in pre-1948 Palestine], but that is a matter of no significance."
When you render human beings insignificant, it is license to
mass murder. All this is by way of prologue because what happened
in 1967 and 1970 raises Sharonism to a fine art. In 1967, the
main actor was the Jordanian military, the right-hand of the
US government and eager to maintain its own domination over its
people than accept any form of democratic dissent. Today, again,
Jordan is wracked with pro-Palestinian protests and its new king,
Abdullah, is as eager as his father to avoid the issue to protect
his throne. The troops in Amman these last few days have gone
after the students with ferocity. The second event is from 1982,
when the Lebanese Falange, pushed by Sharon, massacred the Palestinians
in the camps. Sharonism, via the Jordanian army, the Falange
and the IDF, went after the left Palestinians, thereby creating
a vacuum filled earnestly by groups like Hamas. Sharonism is
the end of debate, because it went after reasonable people with
its weapons, produced a desert of political opinion, and then
used that as an excuse for further barbarity. Meanwhile, the
Palestinians continue to suffer and the US media pities Sharon
for his dilemma.
(1) Jordan,
1970.
The 1967 Six Day War was a shambles for
the Palestinian cause as the IDF decimated the Arab forces, revealed
the total military superiority of Israel and stole East Jerusalem
and the West Bank from Jordanian control. Of Jordan's total population
in 1970, seventy-five percent identified itself as Palestinian.
Nevertheless, both the Jordanian monarchy and the United Nations
repeatedly called them "refugees" or "displaced
persons" and denied them the right to fight for both the
right to their lands in the west or for the creation of a democratic
state in Jordan. Jordan, itself a creation of the British, relied
upon oil monies and its subservience to the other Arab monarchies
as well as to its exploitation of the highly-trained and literate
Palestinian population for its own economic survival. Nevertheless,
the Jordanians, like the Syrians and the Egyptians, utilized
the Palestinians for their own purposes rather than allowing
them to control their own destiny within a democratic framework.
Many Palestinians realized the need to
control the movement, so Dr. George Habash founded the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasser Arafat founded
Harakat Tahreer Falasteen or Al-Fatah. Habash announced that
"the liberation of Palestine will come through Amman [capital
of Jordan]," mostly to challenge both King Hussein and a
broken Nasser (both of whom came under Israeli hegemony by 1970,
something recognized in the US Secretary of State Rogers' Plan).
King Hussein (with help from Zia-ul-Haq of the Pakistani army)
sent in his Bedouin army on 27 September to clear out the Palestinian
bases in Jordan. A massacre of innumerable proportions ensued.
Moshe Dayan noted that Hussein "killed more Palestinians
in eleven days than Israel could kill in twenty years."
Dayan is right in spirit, but it is hardly the case that anyone
can match the Sharonism in its brutality.
The horror conducted by the marginal
Black September group against the Israeli Olympians at the Munich
games came as "retaliation." One barbarity followed
another.
(2) Sabra &
Shatila, 1982
Driven from Jordan and from Syria (in
1976), scores of Palestinians moved to the outskirts of Beirut
into refugee camps. Two such camps, Sabra and Shatila, housed
almost forty thousand people by the early 1980s. Lebanon benefited
from the insecurity in West Asia, since most Arabs used it as
a haven for capital (notably, the Gulf Sheikhs, but also those
capitalists from Egypt, Syria and Iraq who fled the various "socialist"
experiments). The service sector (banking, finance, commerce,
tourism) accounted for seventy percent of Lebanon's GDP and it
ensured an economic boom. The Lebanese state, however, neglected
the project of social justice and the widespread misery among
the working-class and the intermediate classes. A Christian-fascist
group, the Falange, took advantage of the state's callousness
and expanded its ranks from thirty-five thousand (1942) to seventy
thousand (1970). By 1975-76, the Falange was the backbone of
the regime and in September 1982, a Falangist (and Israeli ally)
was elected the head of state. The Lebanese regime, along with
a Multinational Force (US, France, Italy), ejected the Palestinian
fighters from West Beirut and sent them to the camps in the city's
vicinity. The Falange was helped by the IDF, whose then head
Sharon said on 12 June 1982, "We are here to destroy once
and for all the PLO terrorists."
On 2 September, a 50-kilogram TNT explosive
killed Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese ruler. The IDF, in contravention
of the commitments made by US envoy Philip Habib to the PLO,
surrounded East Beirut. On 16 September, at 5pm, the IDF urged
the Falangists to enter the Palestinian camps and for the next
two days, they held off the press and fleeing Palestinians as
the Falange (joined by the IDF) killed over three thousand five
hundred people (Israel claims that only eight hundred died).
Begin, of Irgun fame, refused to conduct an inquiry and blamed
the events on "the bloodthirsty plot being hatched against
Israel and its government." Four hundred thousand people
protested in Tel Aviv on 25 September and forced the regime to
form the Kahane Commission (whose report relieved Begin of "a
certain degree of responsibility" and called for the dismissal
of Sharon and of Raphael Eytan, which did not happen -- both
became members of the Knesset and then Sharon was elevated to
the top post in the land).
The Israeli media attempted to put the
blame on the Falange ("organized riffraff," said Yediot
Aharonot on the 28th) without any acknowledgement of Israel's
instigation and logistical support of the massacre. Edward Said
correctly noted that in Lebanon, Sharon's IDF has "behaved
like an international gangster" (al-Hayat, 6 May 1994).
Sharonism is gangsterism, and even today, as every country in
the world (even, in fits and starts, the US) condemns the IDF
violence, Sharonism continues in complete arrogance.
Meanwhile, children stuck within homes,
afraid that they will be the next martyrs in the crossfire, memorize
the
poems of Mahmoud Darwish:
I saw nothing but a scaffold
With one single rope for two million necks
I see armed cities of paper that bristle
With kings and khaki
September has not been a good month for
the Palestinian struggle. On 29 September 2000, the current Intifada
began when Ehud Barak dispatched the IDF into al-Aqsa, destroyed
the peace process and his own political career. The instigator
of this violence was not just Sharonism, but Sharon himself.
In the decade before al-Aqsa Intifada, Sara Roy shows us how
the Oslo ghetto has devastated the everyday lives of Palestinians:
unemployment during the 1990s rose nine fold between 1992 and
1996, real gross GNP fell by over eighteen percent and real per
capita GNP fell by an even more dramatic thirty seven percent.
"The reasons for Palestinian economic regression,"
Roy argues, "are many and interrelated but turn on one primary
axis: Israel's closure policy, which restricts and at times bans
the movement of labor and goods from the occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip to Israel, to each other, and to external markets,
represents the single most deleterious factor shaping the nature
of Palestinian economic activity and Palestinian life in general"
(this is in Verso's tremendous collection, The New Intifada).
The policy of closure began in March 1993 and the parties signed
Oslo in September of that yearSanother September in the Palestinian
odyssey. The al-Aqsa Intifada, that began in September 2000 and
has now been overtaken by the IDF invasion, "arose in response
to Israel's continued attempt to fragment and weaken the Palestinian
community through dispossession, denial and closure." Roy
concludes.
The architect of Sharonism is not just
Sharon, but also US neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, who
just over a decade ago ("Who Needs a Peace in the Middle
East?" Wall Street Journal, 21 June 1989) wrote, "A
Palestinian state in Gaza would be nothing more than an armed
camp for intransigent irredentists who would be at permanent
war with Israel. Why should Israel agree to any such scenario?
It won't, since it would only end up having to occupy Gaza all
over again. The million or so Palestinian refugees -- by now
mainly children and grandchildren of the original refugees --
did not come from the West Bank, have no family connections on
the West Bank, have no memories of the West Bank." These
Palestinians, in words similar to Golda Meir, have no right to
belong, since they don't exist. This is the ideology of Fortress
Israel - barricade oneself behind the IDF and inflict enormous
pain on anyone who may try to resist your armed might.
And yet, NPR and its compatriots say
that Sharon is reasonable, that Arafat is untrustworthy. You
can trust Sharon, that's right. You can trust him to dip his
hands into blood and still get arms shipments from the US.
Viijay Prashad
teaches political science and international studies at Trinity
College. He is the author of Everybody
Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth of Cultural Purity and The
Karma of Brown Folk. Prashad can be reached at: Vijay.Prashad@trincoll.edu
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