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Today's
Stories
August 22, 2006
Gilad Atzmon
Israel Must Win
Eamon McCann
Bereft Belfast Mother Charges Security
Firms with Wanton Murder in Iraq
Sharon Smith
Bush's Failing War on Terror: When
in Doubt, Go Racist
Edward S. Herman
Faith-Based Analysis
Ramzi Kysia
My Journey to South Lebanon
August 21, 2006
Jonathan Cook
Caught in a Net of Delusion
Paul Craig Roberts
Artificial Recovery; Real Job Losses
Kathy Kelly
Israel's "Proportionate Response":
Measured Amid the Wreckage
Mike Roselle
Irony Runs Through It: Making a Ruckus
Lenni Brenner
Mayor Bloomberg: the Flying Faker
Maher Osseiran
Osama's Confession; Osama's Reprieve
August 19 / 20, 2006
Weekend Edition
Uri Avnery
The
155th Victim
Eliza Ernshire
Terror
and Freedom on the West Bank
Virginia Tilley
Inside 1701: What the UN Ceasefire Resolution Actually Says
Kathy Kelly
Funerals at Qana: a Journey to Southern Lebanon
Marc Levy
You
are What You Dream: "Before you talk of heroes you must
feel, taste, touch, smell the horror."
Stephen Bradberry /
Jeffrey Buchanan
Hopes and Homes: Subject to Seizure on the Katrina's Anniversary
Barbara Rose
Johnston
Banking on Violence: Guatemalan Genocide and US Security
William Blum
Perpetual Fear: Saved Again, Praise the Lord!
Stephen Fleischman
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon
Ralph Nader
The Legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith
Dave Lindorff
Busted, Again: Bush is Two Times a Criminal
Fred Gardner
When Cannabis Failed to Sell
David Krieger
Nuclear Insecurity
Dan La Botz
The Minutemen: Mad at the Wrong Guys
Poets' Basement
Davies / Engel
August 18,
2006
Brian M. Downing
American
Generals and Iraq: Time to Call for a Rapid Withdrawal
John Blair
Divine
Strike in the Bible Belt: Will They Bomb Bedford?
Alan Hart
The Lebanon War, a Post Mortem
Craig Murray
Hitting
a Nerve: the Hair Gel Terror Hype
Chris Dols
Confronting Madison's NaziFest
Emily Kirksey
The Cuban Mirage: Self-Deception in Miami and Washington
Joaquín Bustelo
Forging a New Strategy for Immigrant Rights: Report from Chicago
William S.
Lind
Beaten:
Why the IDF Lost in Lebanon
Podcast of the Day
The F-22 PodCast
Website of
the Day
Burn a Brick for Jesus
August 17,
2006
CounterPunch
News Service
"Goodbye
to the Unipolar World": an Interview with Hasan Nasrallah
Barucha Peller
This
Pain Has No Ceasefire
Ramzy Baroud
Lebanon:
a Critical Battlefield for the New Middle East
Rothem Shtarkman
Gen. Dan Halutz: Inside Trader
Craig Murray
The UK Terror Plot: What's Really Going On?
Samar Assad
Gaza: One Year After Disengagement
Mike Ferner
Lt. Watada's Challenge
Arnold Kohen
A Second Rebirth for East Timor?
Kevin Zeese
Does the Invasion of Lebanon Foretell a Regional War?
Missy Comley Beattie
Open Wounds
Uri Avnery
From
Mania to Depression
Video of the Day
Neil Young: After the Garden
Website of
the Day
Art for Peace
August 16,
2006
Merav Yudilovitch
Apocalypse
Near: an Interview with Noam Chomsky on Lebanon
Robert Fisk
Behind the Lies of Bush and Blair: It Falls to Assad to Tell
the Truth
Mark Williams
The
Missiles of August: The Lebanon War and the Democratization of
Missile Technology
John Ross
End Game Engulfs Mexico
Christopher
Brauchli
The Poor Are Such a Nuisance
John Walsh
AIPAC Congratulates Itself for Slaughter in Lebanon
Ron Jacobs
Gee, Your Hair Smells Terror-ific!: Shampoo, Fear and Elections
Rachard Itani
It Ain't Over: What Did and Didn't Happen in Lebanon
Felice Pace
Forest Fires in the Klamath Mountains: The Real Threat is Not
What You Expected
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Lieberman the Enabler
Frank, Sharma
and Peterson
Venezuela's Revolution of Hope: "In Two Years, Everything
Has Changed!"
Jonathan Cook
Real
Photo Fakers; Real War Crimes
Website of
the Day
You Too Can Paint Like Jackson Pollock!
August 15,
2006
Andrew Ford
Lyons
Why
Hezbollywood Was Born: Digitally Erasing a Massacre
Binoy Kampmark
Terrorism and the Art of Flying
Robert Fisk
Israel Wasn't Hoping for This
Ralph Nader
Bush to Israel: Take Your Time Destroying Lebanon
Todd Chretien
The US Antiwar Movement: Weak, Passive, Distracted
Chris Floyd
It's Bigger Than the Neo-Cons
Mark Engler
WTO: Best Left for Dead?
George Galloway
"You Don't Give a Damn:" the SkyNews Debate
Laray Polk
What's More Obscene: War or Sex?
Trish Schuh
Operation
Change of Location?: Where Were the IDF Soldiers Captured?
Website of the Day
Jesus Never Existed
August 14, 2006
Uri Avnery
What
the Hell Happened to the Israeli Army?
Karim Makdisi
The Flaws in the UN Resolution
Kathy Kelly
Approaching
a Ceasefire
Robert Fisk
The Truce That Won't Last
Norman Solomon
Who's Afraid of Hillary Clinton? MoveOn, for One
Sunsara Taylor
Ned Lamont and the Antiwar Movement: False Hopes, Bad Terms and
Ticking Clocks
Robert Jensen
Outside the Frame: The Limits of George Lakoff's Politics
Mike Whitney
The Litani Gambit: Ceasefire or Trojan Horse?
P. Sainath
An Indian Farmer About to Commit Suicide Writes a Note of Clarification
Goretti Horgan
The Raytheon Nine: Irish Antiwar Protesters Face "Terrorism"
Charges
Christopher
Reed
London Fog: Doubts Hang Over Terror Plot
August 12 /
13, 2006
Weekend Edition
Jean Bricmont
The
De-Zionization of the American Mind
Norman Finkelstein
Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?
Robert Fisk
How the London Terror Scare Looks from Beirut
Adrian Grima
Forget the 50 Civilians: Watching Lebanon from Malta
Barucha Peller
Letter from Lebanon: the Proximity of Death
Omar Barghouti
The UN, Lebanon and Palestine
Adam Engel
Tearing Down the Master's House: an Interview with Derrick Jensen
Conn Hallinan
How the Irish Could Save the Middle East
John Stauber
Meet the GOP's Latest Smear Machine: Vets for Freedom
Rev. William
Alberts
Bush's Primetime Lies Still Go Unchallenged by the Press
Fred Gardner
Hollywood Does Cannabis: "Weeds," the First Season
Lucinda Marshall
Penis Politics: Does Dick Cheney Want Us All to Fly Nude?
Ron Jacobs
Kill the Precedent: an Interview with Rapper Nate Mezmer
CounterPunch
News Service
Kerala Throws Out Coke and Pepsi
Poets' Basement
Katz, Davies and Orloski
August 11, 2006
Col. Dan Smith
Crimes
Against Peace: Beyond Nuremberg
John Ross
Class War in Mexico City's Gridlock
Michael Donnelly
Sore
Loserman, Redux
William S.
Lind
Collapse of the Flanks
Linda Milazzo
Chertoff's New Math: Hair Gel Plot Might Have "Killed 100s
of Thousands"
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Something is Happening Around the World
Azmi Bishara
When the Skies Rain Death
Henri Picciotto
Jewish Dissidents Must Challenge Israel
CounterPunch News Wire
The Warrior Lawyer: Tom Crumpacker, 1934-2006
Dave Lindorff
War Crimes in Lebanon
Jonathan Cook
From High Wycombe to Nazrareth: How I Found Myself with the Islamic
Fascists
August 10, 2006
Uri Avnery
The
Buck Stops Where?
Dave Marsh
Who
Are Mr and Mrs Lamont?
Gabriel Kolko
Reflections
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Arthur Versluis
How
Neocons' Nazi Hero Schmitt Spawned Bush's Totalitarian Lunge
Jennifer Loewenstein
Awakening
the Resistance
August 9, 2006
Linda Schade
Incumbents
Beware: Peace Voters Mean Business
Jackie Mason
Defends
Mel Gibson; Ridicules Abe Foxman
Jonathan Cook
Hypocrisy
and the Clamor Against Hizbullah
Gilad Atzmon
Operation
Security Roof
Charles Hirschkind
Doing
the Lebanese a Favor
Tom Barry
Right-wingers
Ramp Up War on Migrants
Cockburn &
St. Clair
The
Sweetness of Lieberman's Defeat
August 8, 2006
Patrick Cockburn
Requiem
for Baghdad
Paul Larudee
The Lebanese Nakba and Israeli Ambitions
Joan Roelofs
The Malleable US Constitution: a Deterrent to Democracy?
Dimi Reider
An Interview with IDF Refusenik Sgt. Zohar Milchgrub
John A. Murphy
The Democrats: a Party on the Run ... from Its Own Members!
Eliot Katz
The View from the Big Woods: In Which a NYC Antiwar Poet Takes
a Summer Vacation in Canada's Boreal Forest
Tim Llewellyn
Into
the Valley of Death
Website of the Day
Galloway Speaks!
August 7, 2006
Uri Avnery
The Junkies of War
Karim Makdisi
The
Draft UN Resolutions: the View from Beirut
Nadia Hijab
What Israel and the US Wanted May Not Be At All What They Get
Sharon Smith
Birth Pangs and Dead Babies
Magan Wiles
Encounter at an Israeli Checkpoint
George Beres
A New Kind of Bigotry: Lebanon War Exposes Strange Religious
Bedfellows
Rachard Itani
Nice Try, Mr. Bolton
Norman Solomon
Some Nukes Are A-Okay with the US Media
Stan Cox
Presidential Doping Scandal Erupts!
Mickey Z.
Go Ahead, Please Stare at Her Chest
Jonathan Cook
The
Deadly US-Israeli Shell Game at the UN
Website of
the Day
Sam Husseini Interrogates Newt Gingrich on Lebanon
August 5 /
6, 2006
Virginia Tilley
Boycott
Now!: the Case for Boycotting Israel
Uri Avnery
The Black Flag
Patrick Cockburn
Yes, It is a Crusade!: Blair's Mad Speech on Iraq
Sgt. Martin Smith
Military Training and Atrocities: Bad Apples from a Rotten Tree
Gary Leupp
America's Heroes on Trial
Neve Gordon
The New McCarthyism: Academic Freedom After 9/11
Ralph Nader
Hey Joe!: the Ghosts of Lieberman's Past
Peter Bouckaert
For Israel, Innocent Civilians Are Fair Game
Peter Montague
Nukes Rising: Bush Oversees a Global Nuclear Expansion
David Krieger
Global Hiroshima: the Stakes Have Been Raised
Michael Donnelly
"Sir! No Sir!": the Story of the GI Anti-War Movement
Fred Gardner
Dr. Denney Sues the DEA
Catherine Norris
Seeking Justice Abroad: Spanish Courts Issue Arrest Warrants
for the Butchers of Guatemala
Imraan Siddiqi
The Smokescreens of War: Moral Superiority, 9/11 and Islamic-Fascism
Missy Comley
Beattie
One Year After the Death of Chase Comley
Ira Kay
Where is Geography? Getting Beyond the Place Name Game
Dave Lindorff
Let's Build a Wall
Pratyush Chandra
Nuclear Fascism in India
Ron Jacobs
Keeping It Radical
St. Clair / Donnelly
Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Katz and Davies
Website of the Day
Defend Bear Butte
| August
22 , 2006
Michael
Ignatieff on Israeli Self-Defense and Serb Ethnic Cleansing
Faith-Based Analysis
By EDWARD
S. HERMAN
Michael
Ignatieff, now a Canadian MP and contender for a top leadership
position in the Liberal Party, was slow in responding to the Israeli
war on Lebanon. He told the Canadian media on August 1st that “I’ve
been following it minutely from the beginning and watching it unfold
and figuring out when was the time when a statement would be important
and relevant.” (Linda Diebel, “Rae criticizes liberal
rival for delay,” Toronto Star, August 2, 2006). He considered
it necessary to give Israel enough time “to send Hezbollah
a very clear message” that kidnapping soldiers and firing
rockets on Israel will not be tolerated. Of course, Israel was killing
mainly civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure while sending
this message, and there was the question of whether the world shouldn’t
be sending Israel the message that aggression and the commission
of war crimes under the pretense of “self defense” is
not permissible, but like George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, for
Ignatieff the Israeli message was crucial, not any Lebanese civilian
casualties or Israeli law violations.
Michael Ignatieff is a skilled trimmer, who has adjusted his principles
and thoughts to the demands of the U.S. and Canadian power elite,
and advanced accordingly—from academia to preferred commentator
on human rights and other political issues in the U.S. mainstream
media, and on to becoming a member of the Canadian parliament. He
was for some years Carr Professor of Human Rights at Harvard University,
and for several years was a regular contributor to the New York
Times Magazine. He has always found that what the United States
has been doing in the international arena is good—well-intentioned,
necessary for international well-being, and inevitable, though occasionally
flawed in execution. He was a strong supporter of the U.S. wars
in Yugoslavia, objecting mainly to the sluggishness in the application
of force. He approved the invasion-occupation of Iraq and has supported
the use of torture in the abstract as well as specifically in the
Bush administration’s so-called “war on terror,”
and as noted he has recently been very understanding of Israel’s
need to defend itself against the threats of Hezbollah and its other
enemies.
One would have thought it might be problematical for a professor
of human rights to vigorously support two wars (Kosovo, Iraq) carried
out in violation of the UN Charter and hence “supreme crimes”
in the view of the judges at Nuremberg. These two wars of aggression
also resulted in serial war crimes, such as the regular bombing
of civilian sites and the use of illegal weapons such as cluster
bombs, napalm, phosphorus and depleted uranium, that should have
been anathema to a devotee of human rights. But these matters didn’t
bother Ignatieff, who was troubled only by the lag in initiation
of NATO violence in the Balkans and the ineffectiveness and mismanagement
of the occupation of Iraq. Similarly, Israel’s long-term ethnic
cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and massive
human rights violations in the process, have not troubled him in
the least, although he is bothered by the failure to bring “stability”
and the absence of a quiet occupation and dispossession process.
He gets away with this support for supreme crimes and systematic
violations of human rights because he does this only as regards
crimes and abuses carried out by the United States and its allies
and clients. He is quite passionate about the crimes or alleged
crimes of target states such as Yugoslavia and Saddam’s Iraq.
As this bias parallels and therefore supports official positions,
he is treated well by the Western elite and their instruments such
as Harvard University and the New York Times. He can make egregious
errors and unverifiable and dubious claims, accept official claims
as unquestionably true, and apply double standards across the board,
without cost. Treating him well means not only giving him support
and access, it also means letting him get away with intellectual
murder.
Ignatieff came into prominence during the Balkan wars, where he
joined forces with a number of other liberal intellectuals and journalists
who took on the cause of Alija Izetbegovic--author of the Islamic
Declaration and close ally of Osama bin Laden--and the Bosnian Muslims,
and pressed strongly for military intervention on their behalf.1
Ignatieff’s position also aligned him with the Clinton administration,
and he established “close relations” with Richard Holbrooke,
General Wesley Clark and former Yugoslav Tribunal chief prosecutor
Louise Arbour.2 These close links with officials with an axe to
grind might be thought to compromise a journalist and human rights
activist, but it doesn’t work that way in the United States—as
with “embedded” journalists, such links enhance a reporter’s
authority. It is only in enemy states that official connections
and embedding compromise journalistic integrity, as by assumption
our officials don’t lie and manipulate, and/or the linkages
do not cause journalists to lose their critical capacity, whereas
elsewhere governments lie and embedded journalists become propaganda
agents of the state.3
One revealing illustration of Ignatieff’s integration into
the propaganda apparatus of the war-making establishment was his
November 2, 1999 op-ed column in the New York Times on “Counting
Bodies in Kosovo.” By the time Ignatieff wrote this piece,
the wilder claims of the State Department that 100,000 or even 500,000
Kosovo Albanians had been killed by the Serbs had collapsed in the
wake of the very modest results of the intense forensic searches
that followed the NATO takeover of Kosovo after June 10, 1999. The
new claim made by Carla Del Ponte, the Yugoslav Tribunal’s
prosecutor (who had succeeded Louise Arbour), was that 11,334 Kosovo
Albanians had been killed. According to Ignatieff, whether all the
11,334 bodies will be found “depends on whether the Serb military
and police removed them.” Possible error or inflation by the
Tribunal and its sources was ruled out for no reason but deep bias.
Del Ponte had been vetted by Madeleine Albright before taking her
position, the Tribunal had been organized and largely staffed and
funded by the NATO powers, and it consistently served as a PR-judicial
arm of NATO.4 The Tribunal’s investigator, who recommended
dismissing any charges of war crimes against NATO without a formal
investigation, stated that he had been satisfied with NATO press
releases as an information source on the motivations and results
of NATO actions.5 Del Ponte followed his recommendation, implicitly
accepting this use of evidence, and expressing satisfation that
there was “no deliberate targeting of civilians or unlawful
military targets by NATO” (presumably the targeting of the
Chinese Embassy and the Serb broadcasting facility, among hundreds
of other non-military targets, was lawful). Only an unscholarly
partisan would take her number as definitive (and only a partisan
newspaper would invite Ignatieff to write on the subject and subsequently
bring him on board as a regular). Eventually only some 4,000 bodies
were recovered in Kosovo after the NATO takeover, by no means all
or even a majority Bosnian Muslim civilians, and 2,398 remain listed
by the Red Cross as missing, yielding a total—6,398—substantially
below the 11,334, a difference never commented on by Ignatieff or
the New York Times.6
During the Kosovo conflict Ignatieff offered a stream of claims
and interpretations that make an enlightening contrast with his
apologetics for Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and structured
racism. Commenting on an incident in which the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) murdered six Serb teenagers, Ignatieff wrote that this
was “doubtless a KLA provocation, intended to goad the Serbs
into overreaction and then to trigger international intervention.
Yet it is worth asking why the KLA strategists could be absolutely
certain the Serbs would react as they did [he is referring to the
“Racak massacre” of January 15, 1999]. The reason is
simple…only in Serbia is racial contempt an official ideology.”7
We may note first that for Ignatieff the KLA killings were only
a "provocation," not a murderous act to be severely condemned.
Note also that although there is compelling evidence that the Racak
incident was arranged into a "massacre" following a furious
battle, and is therefore of extremely dubious authenticity, Ignatieff
takes it as unquestionably valid.8 On the certainty of the Serb
reaction, killings such as those carried out by the KLA produce
similar responses in civil conflicts everywhere, so that Ignatieff's
blaming it on Serb racism is nonsensical for that reason alone.
But it also flies in the face of Serb tolerance of Albanians in
Belgrade, along with Roma--in contrast with Kosovo Albanian intolerance
of both in NATO-occupied Kosovo.
The contrast with Ignatieff’s treatment of Israel in Gaza
and Lebanon is also dramatic and revealing. With the June 25 capture
of an Israeli soldier in Gaza and at least two other Israeli soldiers
in still-disputed circumstances around the Israel-Lebanon border
on July 12, minimal consistency with his treatment of the Serbs
should cause him to regard these as “provocations” that
induced an Israeli “overreaction,” and he should condemn
this overreaction, which in Gaza and Lebanon has been far more deadly
and murderous than the Serbs’ alleged overreaction at Racak.
He might explain this overreaction and this willingness to kill
large numbers of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians on the “simple”
ground that “only in Israel is racial contempt an official
ideology.” Of course he does not do this, although the case
that can be made for racial contempt as an official ideology in
Israel is vastly greater than the evidence for Serbian racism.9
For Ignatieff, Israel’s legitimate “security needs”
justify the Lebanon response (and he evades discussing the reinvasion
and attack on civilians and humanitarian crisis in Gaza). Didn’t
Yugoslavia’s legitimate security needs justify Racak and other
actions of the Serbs, with NATO threatening an attack--that soon
materialized--and working in coordination with the KLA? There is
of course no hint at this in Ignatieff—his frame of reference
is always that of his side (NATO), and the enemy is always wrong
and has no right of self defense.
Ignatieff was enraged at the Serb expulsions in Kosovo during the
bombing war, claiming that “Milosevic decided to solve an
‘internal problem’ by exporting an entire nation to
his impoverished neighbors,” and he also described it as a
“most meticulous deportation of a civilian population”
and “a final solution of the Kosovo problem.”10 One
would hardly realize from these effusions that Yugoslavia was under
military attack by NATO, forced to defend itself in a situation
where the KLA and NATO were working in close coordination; that
proportionately more [ethnic] Serbs fled the bombing war in Kosovo
than [ethnic] Albanians; that there was nothing “meticulous”
about the flight, induced by the KLA and bombing as well as Serb
actions, and that there is no reason whatever to think that Milosevic
viewed this as a “final solution,” another dishonest
piece of rhetoric that conflates Nazi industrial murder with a war-induced
flight of civilians.
Again, the contrast with Ignatieff’s treatment of the forced
exit of a million Lebanese by the Israelis is dramatic. Here Israel
is justified in “sending a message” to Hezbollah reflecting
Israel’s right to defend itself. Yugoslavia had no right to
send a message to the KLA and NATO powers in the process of defending
itself, although NATO’s war threatened its survival, whereas
Israel had only suffered minor losses in a border skirmish with
a force that did not threaten its existence. Ignatieff has not even
expressed sympathy with the million Lebanese displaced to “send
a message” to Hezbollah; and he will clearly not speak of
this as a “meticulous” ethnic cleansing and “final
solution” via an “export” of Lebanese civilians.
Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross (among others) have repeatedly
declared the Israeli attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure
to be war crimes,11 but Ignatieff has not said a word about anything
wrong with Israel’s attacks on civilians or the use of illegal
and anti-civilian weaponry like cluster bombs and depleted uranium,
and he has never hinted that these frequent and ruthless attacks
on Arab civilians could be because of Israel’s racist ideology,
although the evidence for such attitudes in Israel is massive (which
it is not in Belgrade).
In short, we are dealing here with gross political bias and gross
apologetics for aggression, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Add
to this the fact that Ignatieff has swallowed Bush’s claim
to be striving to “bring freedom everywhere,” an ideological
premise that allows him to rationalize anything the Bush administration
does externally because it is in a noble cause—based solely
on the fact that Bush says that that is his aim (see his “Who
Are Americans To Think That Freedom Is Theirs To Spread?,”
New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005; and my analysis of this
apologetics landmark: Herman, “Michael Ignatieff’s Pseudo-Hegelian
Apologetics for Imperialism,” October, 2005).
Facts no longer matter for Ignatieff; they are trumped by proclaimed
aims and values, but only for the side he favors and that produce
benefits—to Ignatieff and some of the elites that underwrite
his work. Clearly this is a man worthy of a human rights chair at
Harvard, a special place in the Paper of Record, and a bright political
future in our close and reliable ally Canada.
Edward
S. Herman is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton
School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively
on economics, political economy and the media. Among his books are
The Real Terror Network, Triumph of the Market, and Manufacturing
Consent (with Noam Chomsky).
Endnotes:
1. For a general account, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Morality’s
Avenging Angels: The New Humanitarian Crusaders,” in David
Chandler, Ed., Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International
Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 196-216 (as posted to ZNet,
August 30, 2005). The New Humanitarians have been members of a network
of like-minded people, often friends, who have worked in coordination
with government officials and government-linked thinktanks, bonding
and hobnobbing among themselves in Sarajevo or at international
conferences and being fed information by U.S. and, in the 1990s,
Bosnian Muslim officials. Sometimes, they worked together in establishment
operations such as the Independent International Commission on Kosovo
(Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone, Michael Ignatieff, Mary Kaldor,
Martha Minow), the International Crisis Group (William Shawcross),
the American Academy in Berlin (Paul Hockenos), George Soros' Open
Society Institute (Aryeh Neier), and offshoots of these and similar
institutions. The first three groups have been heavily funded by
NATO governments, and have had on their boards numerous NATO government
officials, past and present.
In a nice illustration of what C. Wright Mills might have called
the "social composition of the higher circles" of New
Humanitarianism, Timothy Garton Ash wrote back in 1999: "When
I arrive in the late evening…[at Hotel Tuzla,]…I step
into the lift, press the button for the second floor, and at once
subside, powerless, into the cellar. The reception committee in
the bar consists of Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, and David
Rieff. When I join them, Sontag is just saying to Michael Ignatieff,
'I can't believe that this is your first time here." And he
adds that on the very next day, after arriving at an event hosted
by the Bosnian Muslim leadership of Tuzla, Mary Kaldor welcomed
the group, and the British actress Julie Christie read a poem in
homage to Sarajevo, "glowing white…as a translucent china
cup." Ash, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches
from Europe in the 1990s (New York: Random House, 1999), p.147.
2. The quoted words were used by David Rieff to describe and laud
his ally Ignatieff’s connections with the West’s political
and military leadership, in “Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond,”
Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2000.
3. Back at the time of the controversy that followed the May 1981
shooting of Pope Paul II by a Turkish fascist, the mainstream U.S.
media relied heavily on the expert Paul Henze, rarely pointing out--and
never suggesting any problem based on--lhis 30-year employment as
a CIA propaganda specialist and his having been head of the CIA
station in Turkey.
4. For a compelling analysis, see Michael Mandel, How America Gets
Away With Murder (London: Pluto, 2004), pp. 132-46.
5. Ibid., pp. 188-191.
6. "Statement to the Press by Carla del Ponte" (FH/P.I.S./550-e),
Carla del Ponte, ICTY, December 20, 2000, par. 16; "Kosovo:
ICRC deplores slow progress of working group on missing persons,"
ICRC News, March 9, 2006.
7. Michael Ignatieff, “Only in truth can Serbia find peace:
There is racism everywhere in Europe, but only in Serbia is racial
contempt an official ideology,” Calgary Herald, June 26, 1999.
8. On questions about Racak, see Mandel, pp. 72-80, 170-73; see
also the devastating testimonies of Judge Danica Marenkovic, forensic
expert Professor Slavisa Dobricain, Col. Bogoljub Janicevic, and
Col. Milan Kotur, during the Milosevic defense period, March 23-24,
April 8, 13, and 26, and January 27, 2006. None of this testimony
was reported on in the New York Times.
9. Under the subheading “Root Causes,” Israeli analyst
Reuven Kaminer says “It is impossible to oppress an entire
people for 40 years and not to succumb to the ultimate rationalization
for such action. Anti-Arab racism is endemic to Israeli society.
This racism is so pervasive that it covers the political landscape
like a cloud and infects all the thinking and the attitudes of the
overwhelming majority of Israelis.” (“Who Won and Who
Lost and Why,” Portside, August 17, 2006). See also Edward
S. Herman, "Ethnic Cleansing: Constructive, Benign, and Nefarious,"
ZNet, August 9, 2006.
10. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 86-87, 78-79, 84.
11. See, e.g., Peter Bouckaert and Nadim Houry, Fatal Strikes: Israel’s
Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon (Human Rights
Watch, August 3, 2006; and Peter Bouckaert, “For Israel, innocent
civilians are fair game,” International Herald Tribune, August
4, 2006.
.
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