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April 3, 2002
Robert Fisk
The Seige 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
March 24/30, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Year
of the Yellow Notepad:
Plagiarism and History
Rep. Ron Paul
Slavery and the Draft
Fidel
Castro
A
Better World is Possible
Edward Said
What Price Oslo?
José
Saramago
Justice
and Democracy Denied
Azmi Bishara
Talking to Tanks
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Clearcutting
Montana
Alexander Cockburn
50 Years of James Bond
Wilhelm
Reich
Gethsemane
Claud Cockburn
The Horror of It All
Dave Marsh
What's
Playing at My Houe
David Vest
Remembering Tammy Wynette
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Waylon
Jennings:
an Honest Outlaw
March 23, 2002
Mokhiber/Weissman
A
Corporate Lawyer
Speaks Out
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
Resources:
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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
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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April 3, 2002
Lies of Desperation:
Answering Thomas Friedman
By M. Shahid Alam
Be ever steadfast in upholding equity,
bearing witness to the truth for the sake of God, even though
it be against your own selves or your parents and kinsfolk.
Qur'aan (4: 135)
Greater love has no one than this, that
one lay down his life for his friends.
John (15:13)
As the ratio of fatalities between Palestinians
and Israelis has narrowed during the past few months, the media
mills in the United States that have demonized Palestinians for
the past 50 years have been going into higher gear.
One of the honored captains of this industry,
the honorable Mr. Thomas Fried-man, has now struck a high note
in this campaign with his "Suicidal Lies," in New
York Times of March 31, 2002. His objective is to raise the
alarm for Americans. The Palestinians "are testing a whole
new form of warfare, using suicide bombers," and if this
"new strategy of liberation" is allowed to suc-ceed-presumably
in forcing the Israelis to end their occupation of West Bank
and Gaza-the consequences will be cataclysmic for United States,
and indeed, for all civilization. The imperative for United States
is clear. In order to save Civilization, it must fight Israel's
war as if it were a war for its own survival.
This indictment of Palestinians is built
cleverly, but it is the kind of cleverness that substitutes for
facts and logic. Mr. Friedman opens his indictment by wiping
the slate of history clean of the daily, unremitting struggle
that Palestini-ans-men, women and children-have waged over the
years against Israeli ter-ror, massacres, executions, expropriations,
deportations, house demolitions, sieges, curfews, and myriad
new forms of intimidation and humiliation. This long, hard, constant,
unflagging and valiant struggle over more than 50 years is equated
with the acts of 'suicide' bombers. In the words of Braveheart,
this is history written by those who have hanged heroes.
After completing this demolition job-accomplished
with a wave of his hand-Mr. Friedman proceeds to build his penitentiary
for the Palestinians. His immediate objective is to prove that
the Palestinians "have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic
choice, not out of desperation." There are several steps
in the argument that Mr. Friedman employs to arrive at this devastating
conclu-sion. I have to admit that this charge ought be devastating-if
it can be proved.
Mr. Friedman does not deny that the Israeli
occupation has caused "desperation" (the quotes are
not mine) amongst Palestinians; what he rejects is that there
is a necessary link between their desperation and 'suicide' bombing.
First, "there are a lot of people in the world who are desperate,
yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves."
Surely, Mr. Friedman must have heard of Samson, Guy Fawkes, the
Kamikaze pilots, the Hizbullah and the Tamil Tigers: since almost
everyone else has. The Palestinians can scarcely be credited
with inventing this "new form of warfare."
But there is another way of posing the
question that would shift the onus to the Israelis. A quick glance
at the recent history of settler colonialism reveals that there
have been many episodes, both long and short, of occupation and
resis-tance to occupation, but it is not too often that the oppressed
have employed 'suicide' bombing against their occupiers. Is it
mere happenstance, then, that every time the Israelis occupy
another people-whether it is Southern Lebanon, Gaza and West
Bank-they have had to face 'suicide' bombers? Might the fault
lie in the occupiers, and not the occupied?
Mr. Friedman presses on with his indictment.
President Clinton "offered the Palestinians a peace plan
that would have ended their "desperate" occupation,
and Mr. Arafat walked away." We are back to the canard about
the 'generous' peace plan, so perversely rejected by the Palestinian
leadership. In return for municipal control over a few Bantustans,
dominated by armed settler encamp-ments, the Palestinians were
asked to forego their sovereignty, their right of re-turn, the
right to defend themselves, control over their borders, and rights
to their own water resources. A 'generous' peace plan it was
indeed-generous to the Israelis. Is it surprising that the Palestinians
are castigated ad infinitum for rejecting this plan?
The Palestinians must account for another
sin of omission. They had the option of engaging in nonviolent
resistance-à la Ghandhi-that would have won them
an independent Palestine 30 years ago. But, instead, they chose
the path of violent resistance. Oops! I mean, 'suicide' bombing.
Mr. Friedman writes as if Israeli occupation had somehow earned
the right to expect Gandhian nonviolence from its victims-as
if this was part of the divine package which gave them ex-clusive
rights to historic Palestine.
A presumption so brazen demands a response.
One must ask if the Zionists too had chosen this Gandhian alternative
to appropriating historic Palestine: if at any time their dreams
embraced the Palestinians as associates, equal partners, in return
for sanctuary in their country. Instead, all that the Zionist
visionaries saw was "a people (themselves) without a land,
and a land (Palestine) without a peo-ple." The Palestinians
did not exist: and if they did, they would be "spirited
across the borders" with some small inducement.
This was a dream of settler colonialism:
quite commonplace amongst Europeans in the nineteenth century.
But since the Zionists did not have their own gun-boats, they
would contract out the job to Britain, the arch imperialist power
in those times. In 1917, even before it had acquired Palestine-in
the Balfour Declaration-Britain generously offered to create
a Jewish state in Palestine. A year later, when the British had
occupied Palestine, the European Jews estab-lished their first
settlements in Israel, their heads full of dreams of messianic
colonialism. It is these dreams, resurrecting archaic and arcane
prophecies, that would eventually create a new colonial settler
state in 1948-when, in other parts of the world, such states
were being dismantled.
These are the mechanics of Mr. Friedman's
argument. He does not reject some "desperation" amongst
Palestinians, but this is not why they engage in 'suicide' bombings.
They do this out of a perversity, "because they actually
want to win their independence in blood and fire," and this
has led them to adopt "suicide bombing as a strategic choice."
Mr. Friedman forgets-I admit, it is hard to feel the enemy's
pain-that while the first 'suicide' bombings against Israeli
occu-pation began in 1993, the Palestinians have been going through
"blood and fire" since at least the 1930s.
What this means is that Palestinians
are now engaged in a most dangerous inno-vation in the strategy
of liberation. "A big test is taking place of whether suicide
terrorism can succeed as a strategy for liberation." It
is truly extraordinary that Mr. Friedman, writing on the op-ed
page of the New York Times, can assume that his readers
have never heard of the Kamikaze, the Tamil Tigers, or the Hizbullah.
There you have an index of the power of NYT.
It would appear that the deployment of
'suicide' bombers was a strategic choice made by Japan when the
odds against them appeared to be mounting. It was a choice they
implemented massively, mobilizing tens of thousands to launch
'suicide' missions using airplanes, torpedoes, mines and small
boats. They were also quite effective. Warner and Warner, in
The Sacred Warriors, show that the Allies lost 65 naval
and merchant ships to these 'suicide' missions, and 370 more
were damaged. By comparison, the recent 'suicide' bombings are
minor league distractions. At least until February 2000, the
Palestinians were not the biggest players even in this minor
league. Hamas claimed only 22 'suicide' mis-sions compared to
168 strikes by Tamil separatists.
So why does Mr. Friedman raise this alarm
about Palestinians "testing" "a whole new form
of warfare," "a new strategy of liberation?" Faced
with a second intifada against their deepening control over the
West Bank and Gaza-an intifada that was slowly replacing stone-throwing
children with guerilla war-fare-the Israelis made a strategic
choice. On February 6, 2001, they let loose Ariel Sharon, convicted
by his own courts of personal responsibility for the Sa-bra and
Shatilla massacres, to crush the new intifada. But the Palestinian
re-solve, tested for 33 years under the occupation of the world's
most efficient military machine, refuses to capitulate before
yet another round of warfare. The people who should have been
"spirited across the borders" by beads and baubles
have shown yet again that their spirits will not be cowed: that
they will rise to match and neutralize the power of Israeli military.
Mr. Friedman admits this. The Palestinian
resistance-he calls it 'suicide' bombing-"is working."
That is what alarms him. He thinks that Israel now "needs
to deliver a military blow that clearly shows that terror will
not pay." In other words, he wants United States to give
Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinian resistance.
This might mean more Palestinian deaths, more house demolitions,
more incarcerations, and may be even deportations on some significant
scale. Everything that is necessary to crush the resistance.
Yes, the Europeans will make noises-and there will be some noise
in the Arab streets. But with solid American backing, none of
this should matter. At least, that is Mr. Friedman's fantasy.
I have been placing 'suicide' in 'suicide'
bombings within quotes. This requires an explanation. The Oxford
English dictionary defines a suicide as "one who dies by
his own hand." This definition is clearly inadequate. In
the absence of a motive, we cannot distinguish between (i) a
person who takes his life because he wants to die and
(ii) a person who takes his life because this will save
her soul-or her honor, her family, her friends, her community,
or her country. The first suggests suicide; the latter is ordinarily
regarded as a martyr. Judge for yourself then whether the Palestinians
are suicides or martyrs.
Although the Jewish tradition considers
suicide reprehensible, it admits excep-tions. According to the
Talmud-Kaplan and Schwartz, A Psychology of Hope-"suicide
can be permissible and even preferred" when the alternative
is forced apostasy or torture that is beyond endurance. Imaginably,
the Palestinians who choose to 'sacrifice' their lives might
argue that the pain and indignity of life under Israeli occupation
exceeded their capacity for endurance.
Use your imagination again. Consider
a different history of Germany and Europe-one without the Second
World War, without the Final Solution, with-out Auschwitz-all
because a lone Jewish 'suicide' bomber in 1938 had pene-trated
the inner chambers of Nazi leadership and blown them to smithereens
while also killing herself. Would this 'suicide' bomber-and her
likes-also be regarded as a threat to all civilization? What
would Mr. Friedman say about her?
M. Shahid Alam
is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston.
His recent book, Poverty from the Wealth of Nations was published by Palgrave (2000). He may be
reached at m.alam@neu.edu.
Copyright: M. Shahid Alam
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