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Today's
Stories
March 10, 2004
Gary Leupp
On Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the
Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
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.
|
March
10, 2004
An Anti-Civilizational War?
America
and Israel on the Frontline of Colonialism
By M. JUNAID ALAM
He that is shipped with the Devil must
sail with the Devil.
-Defoe, Captain Singleton
For the past five hundred years, humanity has
witnessed the ascension of a civilization which acclaims the
Rights of Man but kills non-white man wherever it finds him.
The Western authors of social contracts and constitutions granting
freedom and liberty for their kinsmen also granted themselves
the freedom to take liberties with the lives and fate of the
non-white world. For while it was widely understood that humans
have certain inalienable rights, chaining or whipping Black 'sub-humans'
and expropriating or uprooting Indian 'savages' were considered
well within these rights. And so, within its own selective borders
the glowing attributes of Western civilization shone brightly,
but for the untamed darker sections of humanity, rifles and bayonets,
later replaced by bombs and missiles, were the preferred methods
of enlightenment.
None of this has changed. The victims
of extermination, invasion, segregation, settler colonialism,
napalm, and apartheid at Wounded Knee, the Philippines, the American
South, Algeria, Vietnam, and South Africa share with the new
target of Iraq one binding feature: they all received the death
kiss of 'Western values'. Today, the regenerating ranks of colonialism
shoulder a slightly revised version of White Man's Burden, but
still never fail to cite Western values when devaluing non-Western
life, endearingly termed collateral damage. Instead of brushing
aside these sins as mere aberrations or expressing self-indulgent
remorse, we can analyze the ideological rationalizations and
practical aims of the new 'war on terror' in terms of the deep
contradiction between proclaimed Western values and practiced
Western viciousness towards the racial Other.
Western civilization, now spearheaded
by the United States, envisions itself as the harbinger of progress,
uplifting heathens everywhere. For centuries, the West has been
able to successfully maintain its denial of the havoc it has
wrought, the trail of tears and blood it has left trickling across
Asia, Africa, and Latin America, precisely because its victims
have been so effectively crushed. The indigenous inhabitants
of the 'New World', long ago decimated and virtually exterminated,
pose no threat to Western self-adoration. Resistance to colonialism
across the Third World, first mowed down by machine guns, was
later mollified by cultivating subservient local bourgeoisies
chained to Western capital. Those who dared defy the West, the
Lumumbas, Nassers, and Allendes of the world, were targeted,
isolated, and destroyed.
America's mainstream intelligentsia -
itself ensconced in material comfort and security - saw little
reason to object to its nation's creative methods of extending
freedom: sponsoring dictators, training death squads, carpet
bombing, overthrowing democracies, and carrying out massacres.
In essence, America could claim to benevolently export freedom
and democracy to all four dark corners of the world because the
corners were sufficiently far away from the Center and their
inhabitants sufficiently weak - and insufficiently white - for
this lie of benevolence to maintain its coherence.
On September 11th, that coherence was
shattered. The previously remote four corners of the world converged
on the citadel of civilization in the form of four hijacked airplanes;
in a scene of horrific carnage, two of them crashed into New
York's Twin Towers, causing them to collapse. For a brief moment,
the guns were pointed in the opposite direction -West.
But whose guns were they? The Islamic
fundamentalists behind September 11th , trained and financed
by American intelligence throughout the 1980's, were bred for
the purpose of "giving to the USSR its Vietnam war,"
according to Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.[1]
Insofar as these unsavory characters were useful in sowing chaos
in Afghanistan, they were, in Reagan's words, "freedom fighters."
Yet that is only half the equation, as bin Laden had his own
grievances against America: US military presence in Saudi Arabia,
support for corrupt Middle Eastern regimes and Israel, as well
the decimation of Iraq. These grievances resonate strongly with
people throughout the region. Thus September 11th was a result
of both U.S. sponsoring of fundamentalism and anger at U.S. domination
of the region; the attacks were a refracted response to U.S.
policy delivered by its own former proxy.
Inevitably, the American political elite
were interested in neither of these two concrete links between
its behavior in the Middle East and the attacks. Instead of recognizing
the attacks as resultant of the darker side of Western civilization's
dual character, American leadership embraced the more comforting
dualism of good and evil: all savagery was outsourced and attributed
to flaws of the racial Other, all virtue apportioned to the self.
In this first stage of the denial process, what the West had
practiced exclusively for itself at all others' expense was falsely
propounded as its universal values.
Thus Reagan's "freedom fighters",
President Bush informed us, attacked America "because they
hate our freedom." There was to be no probing for root causes:
"You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."
This Manichean rationalization, neatly removing the record of
US state terrorism from the equation, set up the pretext for
intensifying it on a world scale: we stand for freedom, and to
prove it, we must teach the world a lesson. The lie of benevolence
needed to be reasserted, its coherency re-established. As one
US official announced, "We will export death and violence
to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great nation."
[2]
The first consumers of this rather familiar
American export were the Afghans, who had the unfortunate distinction
of being ruled over by the (previously American-supported) Taliban
and their bin Laden associates. The US military killed as many
as 3,000 Afghan civilians in their campaign to dislodge the Islamists.
Not long after American B-52s relieved themselves of 15,000 lb.
daisy-cutter bombs, America also relieved itself of any
serious commitment to rebuilding the country. Funding for basic
national infrastructure has been severely lacking: per capita
spending in Afghanistan is less than half of post-conflict Rwanda,
Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. A veteran observer on the ground
said, "The Pentagon and the White House have absolutely
no policy on Afghanistan."[3] One can already hear the pathetic
plea of Afghanistan's puppet president - "Don't forget us
if Iraq happens" - being drowned out by the roar of American
armor prowling the deserts of Iraq.
As America again swivels her guns and
realigns her crosshairs, it has become painfully obvious that
the more recent war on Iraq has nothing to do with disarmament
or al-Qaeda. Recognizing that informed people might catch onto
this before the war, Bush invoked higher, nobler aims - the liberation
of Iraq's people and democratization. In an important Feb. 26th,
2003 speech to the influential neoconservative American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), Bush issued a remarkable statement: anti-war
sentiment was a sort of racist skepticism which posited that
Muslims were not capable of learning democracy. Beyond doubt
was that Bush represented democracy or that it would be exported
at all only the capacity of the feeble Muslim mind to comprehend
the sheer greatness of Western ideals could possibly be in question.
Bush stressed the importance of removing
Hussein for the purpose of instilling "democratic values"
in Iraq, since "stable and free nations"- like the
United States, for instance - "do not breed the ideologies
of murder," and instead prioritize "the peaceful pursuit
of a better life." The sons and daughters of Indonesia,
El Salvador, Nicaragua and now Haiti - may beg to differ,
but the American-provided death squads, despots, bombs and missiles
once sent to beseech their opinions have yet to return with the
poll results.
No doubt these same democratic and humanitarian
values deeply moved Saddam Hussein when he found the West eager
to supply him with chemical and biological weapons, weapons which
he inflicted on Kurds and Iranians throughout the 1980's with
America's blessings. According to a1994 General Accounting Office
report and Senate hearings, the US government and twenty-four
private U.S. corporations supplied Saddam with anthrax, sarin
gas, VX gas, West Nile virus, bubonic plague, and other chemical
and biological weapons from 1980 to 1988.
Equally impressed by Western democracies'
newfound concern for humanity must be Iraq's civilian population
of 24 million, who bore the burden of the West's propping up
of Saddam and whose health, living standards and children were
decimated by U.S. and U.K-led sanctions. The post Gulf-war sanctions
prevented the importation of basic medicines and civilian equipment,
plunging a previously modern society into Third World despair.
The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that between
January and August of 1991, "an excess" of 46,900 children
died, and a 1999 UNICEF report states that over 500,000 Iraqi
children under five died as a direct result of sanctions. The
last two U.N. oil-for-food program coordinators in Iraq both
resigned and described the sanctions as genocidal: a noteworthy
accomplishment for the two leading democracies of the Western
world.
That Bush's rhetorical flourishes on
freeing Iraq are sharply contradicted by the utter contempt with
which America has treated Iraqi life in the past should surprise
no one: when the West speaks of extending its values, the rest
of the world should run for cover. Yet is had been necessary
to invoke the cause of liberation, for as a massive military
machine stood poised to unleash the fury of Shock and Awe upon
a largely defenseless people, the myth of a virtuous America
waging war against evil appeared increasingly ridiculous.
This second phase of the denial
process - the application of 'liberation' rhetoric - barely conceals
the attitude of racist contempt which underscores not only previous
American policy but current thought among its policy elite.
This is clearly illustrated by prominent neoconservative intellectuals,
whose ideology is so entrenched in the administration that at
least twenty of its "scholars" are directly involved
in Bush's foreign policy planning.
Michael Ledeen, editor of National
Review and AEI analyst, provides the opening chapter of our
fairy tale: "We should have no misgivings about our ability
to destroy tyrannies. It is what we do best." Somehow Pinochet,
the Shah, and Suharto were spared this ordeal, but Ledeen nevertheless
continues, "It comes naturally for usCreative destruction
is our middle name. We do it automatically, and that is precisely
why the tyrants hate us and are driven to attack us." Here
we discover the real next step flowing from the self-serving
Manichean setup - not "democratization," but "creative
destruction." This is to be achieved by precipitating "total
war", explained by another neoconservative as "the
kind of warfare thatbrings the enemy society to an extremely
personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept
a reversal of the cultural trends that spawned the war in the
first place."[4]
Since the West is supremely pure, it
is of course "the cultural trends" of the racial Other
that bear responsibility for conflict. These trends, according
to AEI analyst Joshua Muravchik, are "paranoia, apocalypticism,
tyranny, and violence." To such savagery there is only one
solution, we are informed: "permanently force your will
onto another people," pitting "culture against culture."
Neoconservatives like Washington Post writer Charles Krauthammer
therefore demand a policy which will inculcate "fear and
deep respect for American power" among Arabs. Anything less
than waging war, explains fellow ideologue and former Wall
Street Journal editor Max Boot, would only "earn the
contempt of the Muslim world" as a sign of "weakness."[5]
One gets the impression that these sages are devising not a foreign
policy but methods for breaking slaves into submission.
The sheer absurdity of neoconservative
rhetoric signifies the breadth and scope, as well as the psychological
neurosis, of this new phase of imperialism. Obsessed with drawing
up false distinctions and hammering them out with unparalleled
violence, the system desperately seeks to pass off its own savagery
as a response to an innate savagery of the Other, who must be
brought to Order. This open retreat from universal values - even
at the rhetorical level signifies the first gunshot fired
in the battle for recolonization.
It is a battle that has intensified since
Iraq came under American occupation. For the war planners, thinking
within the 'second phase of denial' mindset of 'liberation',
first imagined Iraqis would greet them with open arms. Needless
to say, nothing has gone as planned. Ordinary Iraqis are furious
at the utter lack of basic necessities including water and power;
they chafe under the same draconian labor laws Saddam once imposed,
hardly unaware of the mass privatization schemes being cemented
by foreign contractors that will leave them jobless; the Sunni
center has mounted a serious armed resistance against both domestic
and foreign signs of occupation; and the Shiite south is demanding
direct democracy against the wishes of the nascent American-controlled
colonial administration
Having uncovered the charade of 'liberation',
Iraqis are now paying the price. For now that the open ingratitude
of the spiteful heathens has become clear, the war planners have
tired of this novel 'second phase of denial' and have since easily
regressed into their more comfortable 'first phase of denial'
instincts: act barbarously in the name of fighting imagined barbarism.
This is epitomized by Operation Iron Hammer (a codename apparently
borrowed from the Nazis) in which random raids, mass jailing,
overwhelming firepower, and punitive actions have become the
norm.
To take a random case, on February 26,
2004 in Kirkuk, US soldiers opened fire on a mother and her four
children in a remote village farmland, maiming the mother, killing
one daughter and crippling another after a bomb went off near
their convoy. A military spokesman offered the absurd justification
that "The soldiers perceived the women were a threat based
on their evasive action" - in other words, the women were
attacked because they were running away.[6] These and countless
similar incidents receive scant attention in the US media, presumably
because evidence that Muslims cannot properly absorb Western
values and the bullet shells they are encased in would dampen
the president's high hopes for liberation. At least 8,000 Iraqi
civilians have died since America's crusade began.
Noticing increasing militancy in Iraq
since their arrival the war planners recently also began bellowing,
"It is better to fight and destroy them all here than to
face them in our cities!" This assumes a fixed, finite number
of 'terrorists' roam the world and discounts the idea of backlash
against American actions in Iraq among resentful locals
an obvious impossibility since America is supremely good and
righteous. Evildoers abroad have also been put on notice that
they will be hunted down whatever the cost; that CIA and FBI
heads now admit this hunt will likely go on for decades only
deepens the faith of neoconservatives like ex-CIA director Jack
Woolsey, who sees the current period as "World War IV."
Let us sum up the result: the occupation
of Iraq has been a fulcrum for greater application of brute force
and greater acceptance of the desperate 'clash of civilizations'
thesis required to justify it. No longer is this an exercise
in abstract speculation: Hundreds of thousands of American troops
now patrol and control a major Arab country that is presenting
serious opposition through armed resistance, mass protests, and
non-cooperation. Like expendable infantry brought out before
the cavalry charge, rhetoric about democratizing Arabs has died
under the treads of American tanks and been overtaken by the
brute logic of its gun barrel.
The logic of the gun barrel is the logic
of colonialism it is the logic that impels the entire American
elite to accept and expand troop presence in Iraq, crush native
opposition, and twist, bend, and mangle its own laws guaranteeing
the rights of its own citizenry. Many even at the elite level
admit that this stance represents a radical break from previous
doctrine. The logic of colonialism is more extreme than that
of sponsoring dictators, client states or factions, demanding
as it does direct and conscious mobilization of an entire society,
not to mention hundreds of thousands of its youngest, who must
serve in the front lines of war.
As America dusts off and cleans out the
old muskets and cannons of colonialism, it is only fitting to
ask the crucial question: who is supplying the ammunition? What
modern force has post-September 11th America turned to for inspiration,
example, and guidance to carry out its colonizing mission? The
answer lies with a state whose very inception and constant expansion
have been bathed in the blood of its maligned victims; one which
has been fighting on the front line of colonialism ever since
it was first carved out by dispossessing hundreds of thousands
of Arabs; an outpost of imperialism aided, armed, and inserted
by Western interests in the land of a people it has occupied
and therefore been taught to hate as a matter of colonial-settler
survival: Israel.
There are of course, even among so-called
'progressives', ears rigged with virtual smoke detectors; when
the carefully constructed mythology of Israel as a 'civilized
democracy' is set aflame by facts and evidence, a repetitive
ringing sound reverberates through nervous 'respectable' heads,
blocking out all reason. But precisely because the idea of Israel
as defender of superior Western values against noxious Arab hordes
is so entrenched, it must be confronted and exposed if we are
indeed to discover the real roots of the 'clash of civilizations'
justification for this latest phase of imperialism
Israel's role as an outpost of Western
interests against the Arabs was by design. The founder of the
Zionist movement, (the European Jewish movement which first advocated
the creation of a Jewish state in 1880) Theodore Herzl, declared
his goal of establishing "a portion of the rampart of Europe
against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism."[7]
After making this pitch to the anti-Semitic Russian Count Von
Plehve in 1903 and a twin white settler movement, the British
colonizers of South Africa, Zionism ultimately struck up a successful
deal with British imperialism.[8] For the Arabs, "most of
whom had inhabited the country for many generations, the Jews
were European colonizers who tried to settle an Arab land and
expropriate it under the protection of imperial powers"
a suspicion "confirmed in 1917 when Britain took the
land for the Muslim Ottoman Empire and granted it, via the Balfour
Declaration, to the Jews."[9]
Zionism's mission was to carve out a
state for European Jews - "a settler minority" - in
the heart of the Arab world.[10] Early Zionists were well aware
that "the implementation of Zionism could only be at the
expense of the Palestinian Arabs" - hardly an inconvenience
because "'Disappearing' the Arabs lay at the heart of the
Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition for existence."[11]
Plans were worked out in a Zionist military document implemented
more than a month before Israel's creation calling for "destruction
of villages by fire, explosives, and mining" and for "expelling
the [Arab] population beyond the boundaries of the State."[12]
Equipped with the understanding that
its settlers "have not come to an empty land to inherit
it, butto conquer a country from people inhabiting it,"
Zionist leadership prepared "compulsory transfer,"
so as to "remove the Arabs from our midst," in Ben-Gurion's
words.[13] Thus even before the outside Arab states intervened
in 1948 - in which case the Zionist militia still "outnumbered
all the Arab forces arrayed against it, and, after the first
round of fighting [] outgunned them too" - Palestinians
were massacred and expelled en masse, stripped of their property
and possessions.[14] The conquering settlers destroyed some 400
villages, swallowed up half the land, and confiscated "British
pounds, jewelry and other over valuables" including hundreds
of shops and "truck-loads of property" from each town.[15]
Once the war was over, some 750,000 Palestinians were relegated
to the status of expropriated refugees, a position of crushing
weakness whose dreadful consequences they have been unable to
escape. Israel's own historians, (the source for most of the
above citations and quotes) consulting newly-declassified archives,
admit that Israel "has committed the sin of colonialism"
through "the dispossession and victimization of a whole
people."[16]
Israeli leaders, seizing all of historical
Palestine by 1967, would come to boast that they are "the
generation of colonizers" presiding over a land where "there
is not one single placethat did not have a former Arab population."[17]
Top Israeli government officials freely express their hatred
of the native with the pride that comes with being a colonial
power, deriding them as "crocodiles", "beasts
walking on two legs", "grasshoppersheads smashed against
the boulders and walls", "drugged cockroaches in a
bottle," and a "cancer" requiring "chemotherapy."[18]
Using a term coined to describe South
African apartheid, Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling describes
his country as an "Herrenvolk democracy," a
regime "in which one group of its subjects (the citizens)
enjoy full rights and another group (the non-citizens) enjoys
none." He adds, "The laws of Israel have become the
laws of a master people and the morality that of the lords of
the land."[19]
The Palestinians remain imprisoned in
ever-diminishing strips of uncultivable land, surrounded by settlers
and soldiers, haunted by increasingly alarming levels of poverty
(50%), unemployment (70%), and hunger, now burdened with - in
the words of one Israeli policeman - "a different kind of
despair, more like the one experienced by the Jews in the European
Ghettos."[20] Such is the magnanimity of our outpost of
'civilization'.
Returning to our broader original line
of inquiry what role does Israel play in America's colonizing
mission we can now see that it is in the perfect position
to proffer much 'advice' on breaking the back of the Arabs. Unlike
previous colonizing missions, there is no 'exit option' for Zionism
it fights on the front line of colonialism because it lives
on the front line; there is no motherland to retreat to for the
colony is the motherland. This adds an additional pressure
and incentive to be ruthless. And now that America has committed
itself to perpetual war, it is keen to take Israel's assistance.
The US military, according to the November
22, 2003 LA Times, "has quietly turned to an ally
experienced with occupation and uprisings: Israel." Since
resistance began in Iraq, "Army commanders, Pentagon officials,
and military trainers have sought advice from Israeli intelligence
and security officials" on the best methods for prosecuting
their own colonial war. US soldiers train in special Israeli
facilities to learn their methods of combat and are diligently
using Israeli software programs showcasing the IDF's actions
in Palestinian territories. That the Israeli army has been indicted
by every major human rights group as guilty of war crimes is
apparently not relevant; as one US commander said, "those
who have to deal with like problems tend to share information
as best they can."
Such "information" has clearly
been put to good use. Five days prior to the LA Times report
the US Army began "leveling houses and buildings used by
suspected Iraqi guerrilla fighters," reported CNN.
Pentagon officials of course "rejected any comparison to
the tactics employed by the Israeli military" but the results
spoke louder; "an Iraqi woman sat among the rubble of houses
destroyed by U.S. strikes" complaining, "They destroyed
our houses and expelled us." More recent evidence of Israeli-inspired
tactics is found in the March 7, 2004 New York Times,
where we learn that more than 10,000 Iraqi men, ranging from
11 to 75 years old have been detained and locked up Israeli-style,
"kicked in the head, choked, and put in cold, wet rooms
for days at a time," with no access to lawyers, no visits,
and no rights, even though "officials acknowledge that most
of the people captured are probably not dangerous"
about 90%, according to cases reviewed by military judges.
None of this is surprising considering
the prevalence of pro-Israeli hawks in the highest echelons of
the US foreign policy elite. The neoconservatives, some of whom
were quoted earlier, are all in broad sympathy with Israel's
far-right and operate at the highest levels of American power.
Once Bush came into office prominent neoconservatives were appointed
to powerful positions: to name a few, Paul Wolfowitz as Defense
Secretary, Douglas Feith as Department of Defense Undersecretary,
and Richard Perle as chair of the Defense Policy Board. Feith
and Perle both advised Israeli rightist PM Benjamin Netanyahu
to destroy the Oslo accords, and serve on the Jewish Institute
of National Security Affairs, a pro-Israel think tank in Washington.
All are strongly linked to the AEI and advocated the war against
Iraq.
It is prudent to ask what consequences
America's tactical and ideological embrace of the world's last
settler-state entails. For it turns out that the state so deeply
admired by so-called 'defenders of civilization' as a shining
symbol of Western greatness is, in fact, falling apart. In an
essay titled, "The Zionist Revolution is Dead," former
speaker of Israel's Knesset Avraham Burg confesses, "The
Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and
on foundations of oppression and injustice." He warns his
countrymen that "a structure built on human callousness"
has led Israel towards "the destruction of Zionism and its
values by the deaf, dumb, and callous."[21] Further evidence
of panic in Israeli society comes from four former chiefs of
Israel's ruthless security service, the Shin Bet. Attacking the
government's policies towards the Palestinians as "disgraceful,
"immoral" and "creating hatred," they call
for unilateral withdrawal due to "serious concern for the
condition of the state of Israel," fearing that "Israel
will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people"
and is "going in the direction of decline, nearly a catastrophe."[22]
Prestigious Israeli reporter Amira Hass
recently condemned the "blatantly immoral logic" of
an occupation in which "those arrogant, cynical and ruthless
settlements of a privileged fat few" force Palestinians
into tightly packed virtual prisons. She opines that Israeli
consciousness is not jarred by Palestinian homes being "full
of bullet holesand cannon shells," their children "shot
in the back" in front of UN observers, their orchards turned
into "scorched earth," or their casualty rate of over
1,200 killed compared to 94 Israelis from September 29th to the
present.[23] In a similar vein, notable Israeli commentator Uri
Avnery recently wrote that Israel's media "enlisted as one
man in the service of the brain-washing" of Israel in its
coverage of the separation wall and in its howling about anti-Semitism
just as "the Israeli Deputy Minister of Defense, Ze'ev Boim,
declared in the Knesset that all Muslims are murderers from birth,
that it is in their genes." He concludes that his country
has failed to become "a normal nation" and is infected
with "the mentality of the ghetto."[24]
One thing can now be agreed upon: Israel
does indeed represent Western civilization in its
ugliest, most ruthless and brutal form, a fact which is now beginning
to haunt Israel itself. It is faced with two problems built into
its foundations: a serious demographic threat (Palestinian population
growth is booming both inside and outside of Israel, threatening
the 'purity' of the Jewish state), which is why some top officials
are calling for unilateral withdrawal from the territories; and
retaliation by weaponized desperation "when [Palestinians]
come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of
Israeli escapism" because "their own lives are torture,"
to borrow Avraham Burg's words again.
The root of this "torture"
is described bluntly by an Israeli soldier who published a book
about his experience in the occupied territories. He writes of
the humiliation and beatings Israel metes out to Palestinians
on checkpoints on the very front lines of colonialism. In one
incident, "Our Arab lay down there and just wept quietlyhe
bled and made a puddle of blood and saliva, which angered and
disgusted me, so I grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head
to the sideOne of the soldiers approached him and punched him
in the stomach. The Arab suffered from pain and grunted, we all
giggled, it was funny. I kicked him real hard [the soldiers]
shouted that I am crazy and laughed and I felt great." Unwittingly
summing up the logic of colonialism, he continued, "The
prestige of the matter is to be crazyviolent in an unusual way."[25]
As Israel sways between moral and material
disintegration, we must ask ourselves: will we let our own country
continue to hang itself from this pendulum of colonial brutality?
Has our capacity for hate, our thirst for revenge, grown so large
that we, too, are willing to follow the same path on an even
more destructive scale - "for the prestige of the matter,"
no less? How far will we go to preserve the ego and arrogance
of Western self-adoration, to maintain and reassert the great
lie of benevolence that has been building to the point of implosion
for five hundred years? Will we continue waging an anti-civilizational
war, debasing and endangering ourselves in a crusade to destroy
the weak and impoverished so as to hide our own sins, of which
their very condition is evidence?
History and humanity await our response.
M. Junaid Alam,
21, Boston, co-editor and webmaster of radical youth journal Left Hook. He can be reached
at: junaidalam@msalam.net
Notes
1. Le Nouvel Observateur (France),
Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 762. Official quoted in Bush at War,
by Bob Woodward.
3. "US general: West is failing Afghans." The Independent
(UK), March 23, 2003.
4. "Conflict and catchphrases." Guardian (UK),
February 24, 2003.
5. "Gimme that old-time imperialism." Jim Lobe, Asia
Times, Feb. 20, 2003, and also see note 4.
6. "Fresh U.S. troops in Iraq mean adjustments to violence,
trust for both sides." Hannah Allam, Knight Ridder Newspapers,
February 25, 2004.
7. Quoted in Maxine Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs (Hardmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books, 1973), p.14; citation taken from Phil
Gasper's "Israel: A Colonial Settler-State", in International
Socialist Review: Journal of Revolutionary Marxism, December
2000.
8. Andre Chouraqui, The Life of Theodor Herzl, Jerusalem:
Keter Books, 1970, p.230, and also Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid
State (London: Zed Books, 1987, p. 3-4.)
9. Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against
the Palestinians, p.21, New York: Verso, 2003.
10. Benny Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of
1948," in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War
for Palestine (Cambridge: 2001), pp. 39-40.
11. Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York: 2001),
pp.404-5; citation taken from the second introduction to Norman
Finkelstein's excellent second edition of Image and Reality
of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
12. see note 9, p. 24.
13. First quote (Israel's first foreign minister, Moshe
Sharret): Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, New
York: Random House, Inc., 2001. p.91, Rest (Ben-Gurion):
Benny Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948,"
in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestine
(Cambridge: 2001) and Benny Morris, Righteous Victims,
New York: Random House, Inc., 2001
14. Avi Shlaim, "Israel and the Arab Coalition in 1948",
contained in The War for Palestine, ed. Eugene L. Rogan
and Avi Shlaim, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. p.81,
89, 99.
15. Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, Free Press, 1986.
16. Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and
Israel, Benjamin Beit-Hallahami; the broad consensus of Israel's
'new' historians puts the expulsion figure around 700,000-800,000
Palestinians.
17. Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan, quoted in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi,
Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel
18. Ehud Barak, Israeli PM: Jerusalem Post August
30, 2000; Menachem Begin, Israeli PM: New Statesman, 25
June 1982; Yitzakh Rabin, Israeli PM: New York Times,
April 1, 1988; Ralph Eitan, IDF Chief of Staff: New York Times,
April 14, 1983, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, Ha'aretz,
August 30 2002.
19. see note 9, p.39,
20. Neve Gordon, "Come to Dinner When the War Ends",
Dissident Voice, March 31, 2003.
21. "The Zionist Revolution is Dead", by Avraham Burg,
originally in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot, September
08, 2003, translated for ZMag (Internet) by J.J. Goldberg.
22. "Ex-security chiefs turn on Sharon" by Molly Moore,
Washington Post, November 15, 2003, interview itself originally
published in Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot.
23. "Words have failed us" by Amira Hass, Ha'aretz,
March 03, 2004.
24. "The ghetto inside" by Uri Avnery, Outlook India,
March 04, 2004
25. Reviewed in Israel's Yediot Aharanot under the title
"A Sadist's book", referred to by Israeli professor
Ran HaCohen in this article (http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h-col.html)
, and mentioned in the online Arab news gateway Al Bawaba,
December 8, 2003.
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