|
May 8, 2002
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
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
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
May
8, 2002
AMERICAN
JOURNAL
Palestine to Move to Dallas-Fort
Worth: Dick Armey's Bold Plan
By Alexander Cockburn
I'd guess it was the most explicit call for ethnic
cleansing by a prominent American since Sherman's designation
of the only good Indian being a dead one, or California's second
governor, John McDougal's declaration in his first message to
the California legislature in 1851 to the effect that "A
war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races
till the Indian race becomes extinct." Mind you, Dick Armey
wasn't calling for every Palestinian in the territories to be
murdered, merely evicted to anywhere, so long as it's somewhere
else.
Here's what happened. On May 1, on MSNBC's
"Hardball", House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey,
puissant legislator from Fort Worth, called for the ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Though Armey magnanimously
stated he "is content to have a Palestinian state"
he emphasized that he is "not content to give up any part
of Israel for the purpose of a Palestinian state."
Armey said flatly that the Palestinian
territories occupied by Israel--in East Jerusalem, the West Bank
and Gaza Strip--are Israel. Palestinians living in those areas
should be removed.
CHRIS MATTHEWS,
host: Congressman Dick Armey of Texas leads the Republicans in
the US House of Representatives. Congressman Armey, Mr. Majority
Leader, why is the Congress about to pass a resolution supporting
Israel at a time that the president is trying to walk a line
between Israel and its Arab neighbors?
Representative RICHARD ARMEY:
Well, we've had--we feel very strongly in the House of Representatives
that we have a moral obligation to protect the safety, security
and freedom of Israel..
MATTHEWS:
What good is this going to do anybody?
ARMEY:
We can no longer appease aggressors in the Middle East. we must
make it very clear that if you want to talk about peace and talk
the talk, you must walk the walk, and that must be respect for
Israel's right to live freely, safely and securely.
MATTHEWS
Do you support the idea that there be a Palestine state alongside
Israel
ARMEY:
I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank.
MATTHEWS:
Well, where do you put the Palestinian state, in Norway? Once
the Israelis take back the West Bank permanently and annex it,
there's no place else for the Palestinians to have a state.
ARMEY:
No, no, that's not -- that's not at all true. There are many
Arab nations that have many hundreds of thousands of acres of
land and -- and soil and property and opportunity to create a
Palestinian state.
MATTHEWS:
So you would transport -- you would transport the
Palestinians from Palestine to somewhere else and call it their
state?
ARMEY:
I would be perfectly content to have a homeland, just as -- most
of...
MATTHEWS:
But not in Palestine?
ARMEY:
Most of the people who now populate Israel were transported from
all over the world to that land and they made it their home.
The Palestinians can do the same, and we're per -- perfectly
content to work with the Palestinians in doing that...
MATTHEWS:
Right, no. No, that's not the question and that's not your answer.
The question here is: What is the future of the Palestinians
who are fighting Israel right now? You say their future is somewhere
besides Palestine. That runs in the way of U.S. policy going
back to 1948. It runs -- it runs completely against the president's
policy and every policy I've heard a president take, which is
that Israel has to give up its settlements on the West Bank and
give it back to the Arabs in exchange for peace. You say the
deal should be the Palestinians leave?
ARMEY:
That's right...I happened to believe that the Palestinians should
leave.
MATTHEWS:
Have you ever told George Bush, the president from
your home state of Texas, that you think the Palestinians should
get up and go and leave Palestine and that's the solution?
ARMEY:
I'm probably telling him that right now.
MATTHEWS:
Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are
now living on the West Bank should get out of there?
ARMEY:
Yes.
Of course there was some predictable
whining from outfits such as the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination
Committee that Armey's endorsement of ethnic cleansing is reprehensible.
It certainly is. But as a matter of realism, let us acknowledge
Armey's far-sighted, two-pronged strategy. One prong is the current
Republican effort to get some sort of purchase on the Jewish
vote, in compensation for the Republicans' slowly dawning realization
that despite all their efforts the Democrats have got most of
the Hispanic vote locked up for years to come.
The other prong is most likely a far-sighted
Texan strategy to grab a slice of the billions in US aid that
go each year to Israel. Figure it out: if Palestinians are kicked
out of their homeland, where are they going to end up?
The Cockburn Plan has been to have them
relocated to Nevada, with the same status as an Indian nation,
able to run casinos or continue their ancient ways, running sheep
on the high plains and mountainsides of northern and central
Nevada. Recall the famous "McCarran window" of yesteryear,
whereby Basques were let into Nevada to herd sheep without too
much trouble from the INS. Hence all those glorious Basque restaurants
across the west, my favorite being the Woolgatherers' in Los
Banos, just east of Interstate 5 in California, where you get
a plate of lamb stew gratis as an appetizer as you gaze at all
the brawny ranchers chowing down at long trestle tables. The
Chalet Basque down the road is pretty good too.
Eventually the Basques went home to fight
for Free Basqueland, blowing up Spanish policemen and sometimes
even generals in this glorious cause. Bolivians were brought
in to talk to the sheep in Spanish. They too have headed home
after the bottom fell out of the American sheep industry after
environmentalists made it illegal to gas coyotes to death with
M-80s. But these days the Great Pyrenees dog fends off coyotes,
and thus there's an opening for Palestinian pastoralists.
Sapient critics like Patrick Brennan
of Virginia Beach have noted the Cockburn plan fails to take
"into consideration what the dominant religion in much of
the empty-quarter southwest would think about this. Mormons don't
seem to make the big deal of this that they once did, but they
claim to be descendants of the lost Lamanite tribe of Israel.
Many Mormon values correspond nicely with positive values of
the Israelis although Mormon attitudes toward women are much
more aligned with those of the Islamic persuasion."
Give this thought, plus the fact that
Palestinian casinoes would be perceived as rivals by Las Vegas,
an industry founded by Bugsy Siegel and one in which Jewish influence
is still marked. So we'd back to square one, though as Brennan
helpfully notes, the Palestinians could support themselves as
custodians of the 96,000 truckloads of nuclear waste destined
for Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
The Armey plan is, I can now reveal,
to have the new Palestinian statelet located in a magnificent
new terminal at Dallas Fort Worth airport, which will bring billions
in federal funding to his district. Having endorsed the eviction
of Palestinians, Armey will then shift position, announce that
with the Palestinians kicked out, Israel is now secure within
its borders and the $3 billion or so in acknowledged direct US
aid can now be diverted to the new Palestinian entity at Dallas-Fort
Worth.
In the aftermath of Armey's robust performance
with Matthews the US Congress gave Sharon the green light to
do what it wants to the Palestinians, with resolutions of unqualified
support for Israel put forward by Senator Joe Lieberman and by
Armey's fellow Texan, majority whip Tom DeLay, the former rodent
exterminator. And who voted against ful-throated endorsement
of the war criminal Sharon? Precisely two members of the Senate
declined to endorse every actionh of a nation that most recently
had rampaged its way through Janin refugee camp: Robert Byrd
of West Virginia (as meister of the pork barrel he was maybe
irked at the DeLay/Armey drive for Palestinian subsidies) and
Ernest Hollings of South Carolina. In the House there were only
21 No votes, including outgoing California rep Gary Condit who
probably now feels free to express his true feelings about the
Levy family, and also my favorites, Ron Paul of Texas and Dana
Rohrbacher of California.
There were 29 reps who oped for the cowardly,
sit-on-your-hands "present" vote, including such Nation
magazine stars as Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Marcy Kaptur of
Ohio and Dennis Kucinich, also of Ohio and a man whose "prayer"
made the rqadical circuits a month or so ago. I guess there's
no place in Dennis's prayers for Palestinians.
The Social
Structure of Cows
Talking of Interstate 5, one of the more horrible
sights on that road, which heads north west up California's Central
Valley is the Harris feedlot, one of the nation's largest, not
far south of Los Banos and its duck hunters and Basque restaurants.
Acre upon acre of cows stand in the savage heat, amid a fearful
stench that you can detect miles in either direction.
It turns out that these doomed beasts
are in appalling emotional turmoil for more reasons than the
fact of their immediate physical travails.
University of Saskatchewan researcher
Jon Watts, a member of the animal behavior research group at
the Western College of Veterinary Medicine has a post-doc fellowship
to study the process of social cognition and welfare in cattle.
Elizabeth Frogley of Saskatchewan's Spark
(not to be confused with the noted Leninist publication of the
same name) reports Watts as saying, "Certainly there is
individual recognition between cows, there's no doubt about that.
But we don't know how far that extends in large groups,"
It seems that cattle form "complex social hierarchies"
in which the strongest cows dominate others. Watts thinks that
cows in groups of more than 200 in feedlots get stressed, lose
any sense of social coherence, and constantly fight for dominance.
There are too many cows around. "My feeling about recognition
is that once you exceed a certain number they never really sort
out the social dynamic of who's the boss," Watts says.
Watts is figuring out ways to get on
the cows' emotional and mental wave length. He plans to train
the animals to push buttons or levers to demonstrate a choice,
and thus figure out how cows recognize each other. Give them
the vote, I say.
There'll Always
Be An England
Authentic entries in the books set forth for mourners
of the Queen Mother to inscribe their grief:
"How refreshing to be able to mourn
the death of a member of the Royal family without being accused
of being homosexual".
J. Fletcher, High Wycombe.
"She was a trooper and she never
gave up. I remember one time she was visiting a school and I
asked her if she would like to make a visit to the
bathroom before she left. 'No' she replied, 'I didn't give in
to the Nazis and I won't give in to the bladder'. That's how
she was, a fighter, who refused to be beaten by anything. She
píssed herself later though, it was sickening".
B. Forrester, North Yorkshire.
"On behalf of all blacks, I send
the sincerest condolences".
T.Watson, Ilford.
"Perhaps if we automated her old
golf buggy it could still drive round The Mall on its own and
bring pleasure to the tourists".
Y. Howell, Slough.
"It is such a loss, God has shat
on our heads".
K. O'Neil, Inverness.
|