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Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories May 17, 2005 Diana Barahona Reporters Without Borders Unmasked May 16, 2005 Michael Gillespie The Family Released a Statement: Death Notices for the Warrior Theocracy Jason Leopold BP Stains the Arctic Jesse Muldoon How Many Schools Left Behind? Norman Solomon Media and the War: "The Bombs in Iraq Explode at Home" Robert Cray Twenty Patrick Cockburn Iraq is a Bloody No Man's Land Website of the Day Bolton's Divorce Papers: She Took It All Away, Including Most of the Furniture May 14 / 15, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Join the 14 Per Cent Club! Saul Landau Lessons from Vietnam: Wars Kill Empires as Well as People Gary Leupp Whither Yale? Towards the Imperial University JoAnn Wypijewski The Glory that is Lockhart, Texas Ben Tripp The Wayward Airplane: a Cautionary Tale Brian J. Foley Was Jesus Gay? Tom Barry Bolton the Eavesdropper Mitchell Verter Barbarous Oaxaca: Indigenous Rights Groups Meet the "Law of the Club" Mike Ferner War on COs: Army Files Additional Charges Against Kevin Benderman Dan Smith Perceiving Darfur Mark Scaramella Death with Pitfalls Don Fitz Mommy, Is This a Finger in My Rice Puffs?: Splicing Human DNA into the Food Chain Diane Farsetta PR Industry Imitates Big Tobacco: the Senate's "Fake News" Hearings Michael Dickinson Soldier Crawling: Military Conscription in Turkey Ron Jacobs The Jackson State Murders Fred Gardner "Hydroponics? Ridiculous!": A Real Farmer Looks at Medical Marijuana Farrah Hassen Far From Heaven: a Review of Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven" Douglas Valentine 50 Cent's Plea Poets' Basement Louise, Ford, Engel, & Albert Website of the Weekend Military Base Closings and the South May 13, 2005 Tom Stephens A Chronology of US War Crimes and Torture, 1975-2005 Patrick Cockburn "They Destroyed Everything" Mike Whitney Tom Friedman, Imperial Chronicler Chris Floyd Miami Vice: the Sleazy World of Jeb Bush Jenna Orkin Ground Zero's Toxic Dust Dave Lindorff Googling for Fun Joshua Frank Yale Fires an Acclaimed Anarchist Scholar: an Interview with David Graeber Website of the Day Botero: Pinta El Horror de Abu Ghraib May 12, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts America is Losing: More Phony Jobs Hype Uri Avnery Death of a Myth Greg Moses Neo-Con Logic at the Border Carolyn Baker The Politics of Dominionism: the New Religious Right in America Pat Williams Amateurish High Jinks on Roadless Areas William S. Lind Reality Gap: the Myth of US Invincibilty Jack Random The Dubious Wisdom of George W. Bush Gary Leupp Douglas Feith Bares His Soul to Jeffrey Goldberg     May 11, 2005 Patrick Cockburn The Rise, Fall and Rise of Ahmed Chalabi: King of Jordan to Pardon His $300 Million Bank Swindle Kevin Zeese The Occupation Gets More Saddam-like Every Day Christopher Brauchli Coffee, Tea or Torture?: A One Way Ticket to Uzbekistan Zalman Amit The Collapse of Academic Freedom in Israel: Tantura, Teddy Katz and Haifa University Robert Shull Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops: Senate Gives DHS Power to Waive All Laws Mike Whitney God, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Anti-Arabic Week at a Southern High School Norman Solomon Political Bluster and the Filibuster     May 10, 2005 Richard Drayton The Imperial Mythology of WW II: an Ethical Blank Check Dave Zirin Steve Nash's Brilliant Year: Anti-War Hoopster Wins NBA's MVP Jackie Corr The Medicare Catch: Mrs. O'Hara's Windfall Dave Lindorff Silence of the Scams: Economists on China Michael Donnelly From Roadless to Clueless: the Great Stillborn Eco Victory Reza Fiyouzat Nomadic Abstracts Scott Parkin Taking Direct Action Against Halliburton Stephen Babcock The Burden of Knowing Better Alan Farago Florida, Water and Lobbyists Michael Neumann Naomi's Courage Website of the Day One Nation Under Plagiarism     May 9, 2005 Louis Proyect Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond, Greenwasher Robert Fisk "Mission Accomplished": the Occupation, Year Two Kevin Zeese Concientious Objection on Trial: the Court Martial of Keith Benderman Joshua Frank Kerry Bashes Gay Marriage Sasha Kramer A Mother's Day Call for Justice in Haiti's Prisons Andrew Wimmer Create and Resist Jeffrey Webber Back to the Streets in Bolivia? Jeffrey St. Clair Straight to Bechtel   May 7 / 8, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Who Beat Hitler? Gary Leupp Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism Saul Landau Pope Torquemada: Purges, Pedophiles and Cover-Ups Joe DeRaymond Autumn of the Revolutionary: Another Look at Daniel Ortega Daniela Ponce Seeing Chile in Nepal Heather Williams Hollywood Does Enron Gregory Elich Zimbabwe's Fight for Justice Anis Memon To Cuba and Back John Chuckman The Peculiar State: "Criticism of Israel is a Form of Anti-Semitism" Mike Whitney Hard Right Rage Against the Truth Ron Jacobs Re-Reading "Born on the Fourth of July" as the Iraq War Grinds On Colin Kalmbacher Whither Disorder? Ann Coulter and the Texas Police State, Cont. Lance Selfa Uprising in Mexico City Fred Gardner "Getting High is a Little Like Cuba" Ben Tripp Letters on Wittgenstein Mickey Z. The Mother of All Days Richard Joseph Those Patriotic Magnets Dr. Susan Block Come As You Are: Masturbation 101 Poets' Basement Smith-Ferri, Louise, Nettnin, Engel and Albert   May 6, 2005 Patrick Cockburn Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and Blood Erin Yoshioka Another "3 Strikes" Travesty: Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison? Sam Husseini Talking with Syrians Dave Lindorff Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters Kevin Zeese Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead Guilty Joshua Frank An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War Dan Bacher Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water Raid P. Sainath India's Bloody Water Wars   May 5, 2005 Carles Mutaner Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist" or "Populist?" Carl G. Estabrook Is There Any Hope for the Pope? Farrah Hassen The US's Syrian Obsession Kevin Zeese "Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview with Patrick Resta Michael Leonardi May Day with an American Soldier in Rome Bennett Ramberg The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You Ray McGovern The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit Norman Solomon Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran Nicole Colson The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights Brian Concannon, Jr. Clearing the Fences in Haiti     May 4, 2005 Colin Kalmbacher Ann Coulter and the Police State: Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested John Walsh Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying on Air America to Support the War Greg Moses Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises "Birth of a Nation" Ali Khan Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart Chris Floyd Ring Them Bells Linda S. Heard D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics Dave Zirin The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle William S. Lind Fool's Paradise Gary Leupp Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution Website of the Day Kent State, May 4, 1970   May 3, 2005 Dave Lindorff Bush has Grasped the Third Rail, Now Turn on the Juice Brian Cloughley Halliburton's War Loot Ira Kurzban Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers Seth Sandronsky Towards Debtors' Prisons? Gilad Atzmon The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More Michael Donnelly Branding Eco Collapse Alex Sanchez Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush? Peter Linebaugh Magna Carta and May Day   May 2, 2005 Ron Jacobs Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement Stan Goff The Case of Hasan Akbar Karyn Strickler Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics Joshua Frank Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly Kevin Zeese Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam Vicente Navarro Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician       April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and "Credibility" Gabriel Kolko Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later Jennifer Loewenstein The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood Lee Sustar City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago Saul Landau The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power T.W. Croft The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy Nikolas Kozloff Fox News v. Hugo Chavez William Blum Never-Ending Double Standards Dave Lindorff Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly Joshua Frank The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls Doug Giebel Saving Jane Fonda Steven Erlanger A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief Fred Gardner Washington State Doctor Harassed Mike Whitney Another Mad Bush Press Conference Kurt Nimmo Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine Joe DeRaymond A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania Michael Dickinson Flags Mickey Z. May Day at Yankee Stadium Justin Taylor The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy Poets Basement Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair Website of the Weekend Save Barbados's Cowpastor                                             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.     Subscribe Online

May 17, 2005 A Force to be Reckoned With The New Palestinian Uprising By RAMZY BAROUD Nearly five years have passed since the Palestinian people transformed their hunger for long denied rights into a commanding display of will and valor: Al-Aqsa Intifada. I don't claim nor will I attempt to offer a thorough examination of the second Intifada, but wish only to suggest a feasible entry to the intricate subject. First, the uprising was not a local experience by any standards. Not only did it impose itself in the arena of regional and international politics, but it also grew in value and meaning to become a central icon in the emerging global consciousness of a new generation in the West as well as other parts of the world, from Latin America, to Africa to Southeast Asia. Thus, and despite the uniqueness of the Intifada to those who have lived it, one simply cannot ignore its outreach nor diminish its outer dimensions, which have been, even before the official manufacturing of the State of Israel in 1948 on the remains of Palestinian lives, utterly crucial. The State of Israel, as Edward Said and others have long argued, existed in Zionist awareness and was deliberately transformed to become an essentially Western priority before the actual physical construction of the state on the yet to be destroyed hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages. Therefore, a deconstruction process was, and is still of essence if Palestine is to duly become, not just a Western, but in fact an international priority. How to go about making it an international priority is an entirely different topic. What I wish to register here is that despite the Palestinian uprising's initial success in breaking away from the over-internalized and self-defeating political discourse brought about by the dominant sector of the PLO and later by the Palestinian Authority, the same failing approach has been adopted again, and thus the Intifada is being discredited, if not silenced altogether. Second, the Palestinian struggle has been woven together, with all of its failures and triumphs by successive generations of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories. Therefore, any mandate over an historic settlement with Israel would have to take into account the millions of Palestinians in neighboring Arab countries and those scattered the world over. A PA president, elected by a decisive or a modest majority has no exclusive mandate over critical matters that touch all Palestinians in Diaspora, especially the issue of the right of return for Palestinian refugees. That right " enshrined in international law, notably in UN Resolution 194 of Dec. 11, 1948 and reconfirmed numerous times since then " is the cornerstone of the Palestinian struggle, and discarding it is tantamount to an historic validation of the very racially prejudiced principle that invented and reinvented Palestinian catastrophes throughout the years. Third, there is the issue of Palestinian constants. Various historic periods in the Palestinian struggle and the different stages of the Arab-Israeli conflict have greatly shaped the prevailing priorities of the time. In the early stages of the conflict, due to the absence of a major Palestinian political voice, the problem was confined to that of refugees and the immediate humanitarian calamity created by their displacement. There was no Palestinian nation to speak of, no shattered prospects of a statehood to urgently restore, and no unified Arab front with a decided agenda to bring about such a likelihood. That said, one could hardly overlook the existence of a Palestine, neither figuratively nor metaphorically, in the minds of Palestinians since their earliest generations in the twentieth century. The existence of that Palestine can be argued on more than a material basis " a nation that called itself Palestinian is one. But since much earlier dates Palestinians knew what Palestine was and what it meant to them, they recognized its boundaries, geographical uniqueness and political reality and prospects. They revolted as a nation and celebrated as one. Not even the uprooting of nearly a million Palestinians in 1948 has changed that identity nor has it disfigured that relationship. In fact, it could be argued that the bond between Palestine and the Palestinians evolved to a higher level of consciousness following their forced departure in the mid and second half of the past century. One of the many challenges posed by the Oslo process however, was the molding of a considerable political culture that no longer adheres to fixed constants. Anything can be negotiated, bargained and "resolved", depending on the level of Israel's cruelty in dealing with Palestinian political tenacity " or inflexibility by a different definition " and the American pressure to make a one-sided "compromise" possible. The likely growth of this "pragmatic" political culture can prove devastating and paralyzing in the quest for a politically sovereign and territorially meaningful Palestinian state, and if not confronted and overpowered, another self-destructive political "compromise" is likely to impose itself on the truly representative Palestinian struggle. Fourth, the coming period is likely to witness the return of a cluster of, I dare to term, "intellectual middlemen" among Arab and Palestinian intellectuals in the West, and most markedly in the United States. This group is often active at Congressional hearings and is given extra airtime on television and additional space in national newspapers, with the purpose of breaking the ranks of Palestinian activists abroad. But much more dangerous is their willful involvement in yielding Palestinian rights while giving the false impression that they speak on behalf of the Palestinian people. Finally, it must be stated that Palestinian resistance, which for the most part has been a nonviolent and popular movement, shall continue as long as the circumstances that contributed to its commencement remain in place. In fact, Israeli oppression is now crossing the traditional boundaries of daily murders and small-scale land confiscation. Under the deceptive "disengagement" from Gaza smokescreen, West Bank lands are being vigorously expropriated while Israel's Separation Wall, illegal according to the International Court of Justice decision of July 2004, is swallowing up whole towns and villages. This reality, as history has taught us, is only a prelude to another popular Palestinian response, which is already echoing with the angry chants of destitute farmers whose lands are being affectively annexed by the encroaching Israeli wall. Regardless of how historians choose to chronicle the second Palestinian Intifada, it will always be remembered by most Palestinians, as well as by people of conscience everywhere, as a fight for freedom, human rights and justice; it will remain a loud reminder that popular resistance is still an option " and one to be reckoned with at that. Ramzy Baroud is a veteran Arab-American journalist. He is the author of the upcoming volume entitled, "A Force to Be Reckoned With: Writings on Al-Aqsa Intifada." To receive Baroud's weekly syndicated column, write to: russ@palestinechronicle.com