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June 26, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
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 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
|
June 26,
2002
How Arafat Failed Israeli Interests
Sharon as Bush Speechwriter
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
Put your flak jackets on, President George Bush
has spoken. He wants a regime change in Palestine, just as he
wants a regime change in Iraq. He reads the Israeli government
press handouts and accurately quotes them to his American people.
Ariel Sharon, wants the destruction/
liquidation/ resignation of Yasser Arafat. So does Mr Bush.
"Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership
so a Palestinian state can be born," Bush told the fearful
American people, waiting for the next apocalypse, be it on 4
July or after.
So, no Palestinian state unless Arafat
goes. There were no Bush conditions for Israel. He did not secure
an end to the continuing building of Jewish settlements for
Jews and Jews only on Arab (that is somebody else's) land. Nor
did he secure a halt to continuing Israeli military "incursions"
-- how I love that word "incursions".
Mr Sharon, in his highly mendacious demand
for Palestinian "'transparency", has demanded Palestinian
reform must be neither cosmetic nor an attempt to preserve Arafat.
And what does Mr Bush say? Why, that Palestinian reform "must
be more than cosmetic changes or a veiled attempt to preserve
the status quo".
Why, I wonder, doesn't Mr Bush let Ariel
Sharon run the White House press bureau? Not only would it be
more honest--we would at least be hearing the voice of Israel
at first hand--but it would spare the American President the
ignominy of parroting everything he is told by the Israelis.
All that he offers to the Palestinians
is a ghastly mockery of what the Palestinians are told to do
by the Israelis.
There never has been an "interim"
state, let alone a "provisional" state. These are
fantasies of the Israelis and Mr Bush. White House "officials"
-- we can guess who they are -- believe a Palestinian state can
be "achieved" within 18 months. Let's forget international
law provides for no such entity.
Let's go over again that most crucial
-- and most dishonest -- part of the Bush statement.
"When the Palestinian people have
new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements
with their neighbours," he told us, "the United States
of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state,
whose border and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be
provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in
the Middle East." Let's see what this means: when the Palestinians
have elected a leader whom the Israelis want -- a condition
that could go on to the crack of doom -- the Americans will
support a Palestinian state whose very existence will mean
nothing unless Israel approves what that state wants to do.
In other words, the United States will
be Israel's spokesman in any negotiations. A growing number
of Americans know they are being suckered by their own government
and their own press, that their country's foreign policy is
being manipulated to give maximum support to one -- and only
one -- country in the Middle East. So will "certain aspects
of its sovereignty". Note these weighty words. "Certain
aspects" of its sovereignty.
What, I wonder, does this mean? Do these
"certain aspects" include the continuation of illegal
Jewish settlement building? Or the absence of any international
guarantees for this interim/provisional state? Or perhaps a
get-out clause for the United States to wash its hands of the
whole shebang if Israel decides to annex the entire West Bank?
Note, again, the weasel words. Palestine's
borders will be "provisional ... until resolved as part
of a final settlement in the Middle East". Yet never before
has an occupied people been led by so pathetic a person as Yasser
Arafat. Nineteen years ago, this same Yasser Arafat swore to
me -- on a hilltop above the Lebanese city of Tripoli -- that
his "Palestine" would be "a democracy among the
guns". His Palestine, he told me, would be unlike any other
Arab state. There would be no secret policemen, no "regime",
no cronyism, no corruption.
Fast forward to the spring of 1998. I
am listening to a French diplomat who has returned from Gaza.
He and his delegation carried a personal letter to Arafat from
President Chirac. Again and again, Arafat disregarded the letter,
only interested in when the new French school in Gaza will open.
The diplomats understand. One of Arafat's relatives will be
the headmistress of this school. Family before nation. The Chirac
letter stays unopened.
Yes, as Nabil Shaath, one of the most
loyal -- and most obsequious -- of Arafat's ministers, says,
"a state is a state, and you cannot be provisionally pregnant
and you cannot have a provisional state". It might have
been wiser -- and more honest -- if he had reminded us that
the CIA trained the gunmen and intelligence thugs who worked
for Arafat; if he had outlined the imprisonment and torture
that Arafat inflicted on his Palestinian opponents with the
complicity of those who supported the "peace process".
For it is becoming ever more obvious
that Arafat did not fail in his duties as Palestinian leader.
He failed in his duties as Israel's -- and thus America's --
proxy colonial apparatchik in the West Bank and Gaza. The fact
he is a corrupt little despot does not change this.
He was given time to prove his loyalty
to the West, to America, to Israel. He was supposed to have
made Israel's settlements both safe and sacred.
Now, when he can no longer control the
people he was supposed to control -- remember the BBC's repeated
question: "Can he control his own people?" -- his
usefulness is at an end. He must go, to be replaced by our choice
of leader -- forget elections -- who will be as democratic as
the new Afghan "interim" government.
George Bush insulted the Palestinians
and enraged the leadership of the Arab world. Who cares about
the latter? Most of them were appointed by us. But I have a
feeling that the Palestinians will not accept this nonsense.
Which is why they will be condemned --
as never before -- as "terrorists".
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