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April 30, 2002
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
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
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The New Crusade:
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By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
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The New Intifada:
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April 30, 2002
Letters to the Writer, the April
20th Crowd Estimates and the Peace Movement
By Mike Leon
Madison, Wisconsin. Last year the online magazine Slate ran a piece
by Jacob Weisberg abusing the American peace movement ("Left
Behind," December 4, 2001) that rather pissed me off.
In what seemed a mocking hit piece, Weisberg
derided the anti-war movement as "insignificant...(and)...irrelevant,"
comprised of some "5 percent" of the populace including
artists and intellectuals and one Noam Chomsky, in whom past
liberal allies "now recognize clinical symptoms that have
been obvious to everyone else for years."
Weisberg, an excellent and entertaining
writer (see, for example, his "The Football Caucus...,"
Slate May 2, 1998), concludes that those liberal journals policing
the peace/war debate such as it was, "are dropping the rhetorical
equivalent of daisy cutters (massive BLU-82 bombs) on a few malnourished
left-wing stragglers."
Indignant, I contacted Chomsky and asked
him to write a reply letter for publication in Slate. I contended
that the liberal line, Slate/New Republic/Atlantic/New Yorker,
merited a written response if only because the reader letters
section presents an opening for punching through a "peace
/ stop the killing of innocent civilians" view into war-mongering
liberal journals that otherwise refuse to address peace arguments
in print beyond mere ridicule.
Write a letter to this guy, Noam. Fire
back.
Chomsky declined, (I thought he would).
He wrote back to me, "I'd seen Weisberg's piece. Your suspicion
is right. These (liberal publications) are cesspools I don't
want to climb into. He (Weisberg) doesn't even make an attempt
to present an argument, because he knows perfectly well that
he can't, and that if he says anything substantive--anything--that
will open the door to a response. He's no fool, and he knows
that there is no way to respond to a tantrum....(L)iberal intellectuals
have lined up in support of the war machine in the familiar style
-- discussed, for example, by Randolph Bourne in classic essays--and
since they know they do not have the intellectual competence
to deal with those who refuse to go along, resort to what comes
natural to the educated classes: hysterical tantrums, lies, and
abuse. Why become involved? There are more important things to
do--such as continue to falsify their increasingly desperate
claim that everyone is following them in their depraved subordination
to power."
One can understand Chomsky's preference
for spending his time in political organizing and writing pursuits
over responding to hits with letters to liberal magazines--especially
after the liberal journals' lifetime's worth of tantrums and
lies smearing Chomsky and almost uniformly refusing to engage
the man's arguments.
For most of the rest of us, the letters
section of a journal is worth the effort to advocate a reasoned
view in response to a published article. Use it.
CounterPunch's editors make available
contact information for the specific writer of a published piece.
I have received many letters from readers
in response to the "200,000 Protest
the 'War Without End,' - 'We Are All Palestinians Today'"
(CounterPunch, April 21, 2002) filed from Washington D.C.. Most
were positive. However, hysterical tantrums and abuse well describe
the words of those few readers objecting to the report that Americans
can possibly be identifying with the victims of American-Israeli
aggression.
Unlike Chomsky, I feel compelled to dive
into these cesspools of written hate and abuse, even if they
lack the well-crafted prose and elegant style of the writers
in liberal journals, and (as opposed to liberal writers) are
hateful and distasteful.
Typical of this tantrum-abuse ilk is
a reader identifying himself as Nick Lewis.
"You filthy traitor, just spoiling
for a fight. Hate everything...," (April 24) wrote Mr. Lewis
before falling into greater depths of inanity.
Another response (reprinted below without
editing) comes from a reader identifying himself as Bill Moore
of Rohnert Park, California. "You must be paid to lie !
but your ripping off whoever is paying you! i have 6 family members
in d c and Baltimore if 20000o people demonstrated against like
you claim ill kiss your ass ! in public pops bad expression your
kind go in for that sort of thing just move to Iran or do the
world a favor and kill yourself rid the human gene pool of scum,"
(April 21) wrote Mr. Moore.
In response to Mr. Lewis and Mr. Moore,
I note that I find their apparent vision of American democracy
to be as troubling and distasteful as their inane and sick politics.
Yes, by analyzing and writing about the policies of my country,
I remain "spoiling for a fight," but this is my civic
obligation and my constitutional right, the exercising of which
does not make me a "traitor." I do write for a LGBT
civil rights periodical in Wisconsin (IN Step), also I am a card-carrying
member of the ACLU. I find Mr. Moore's bigotry revealing, bringing
to mind an image of the "gaping primates" described
in H.L. Mencken's reporting from the bible belt on the fundamentalist
evolution opponents in the 1925 Scopes trial. Finally, with respect
to the size of the April 20 crowd in D.C., I agree that the published
200,000 estimate merits a full-blooded explanation.
April 20, DC
Crowd Size
The "200,000 Protest the 'War Without
End,' 'We Are All Palestinians Today'" piece generated
many letters contending that the reporting of the crowd size
estimate was incorrect.
A precise rendering of the number attending
a protest rally of this size is not ascertainable, both because
of the impossibility of a single count during an instant in time
and the constant changing of the number of people involved. Invariably,
estimates of the crowd size in this type of march wildly diverge.
The Washington Post cited DC park police
putting the number at 75,000, although earlier filings from the
Post in the afternoon and evening of April 20 put the count at
35,000 and 50,000.
DC Police Chief Ramsey, in a conversation
with me at approximately 3:30, put the number in excess of 100,000.
Several Palestinians I spoke to put the
number over 250,000. Three gentlemen on an elevated white truck
with an excellent long view over the crowd -- with people streaming
in and out and others lining Pennsylvania Avenue--guessed 200,000,
"easily," one agreed.
I cited all of these numbers in the piece
(with the exception of the Post's earlier estimates), identifying
them as the opinion of different sources.
All a journalist covering a march of
this size can do is offer multiple sources' estimates, state
that different sources have different estimates, and make a reasonable
guess (identifying it as an approximation). I believed the 200,000
figure reflected in the headline met this reasonable standard,
although if I were to convey this 200,000 figure to the Palestinians
I spoke with, they would certainly quarrel with the figure.
Now, I am not so sure. I believe that
a more accurate headline should have read "Tens of Thousands..."
instead of "200,000." After reading other published
accounts of the march and after conversations and e-mail dialogues
with other people attending the march, the attendance figure
seems more likely to be somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000.
Peace Movement
That noted, I maintain that the high
attendance of the April 20 event would seem suggestive of a peace
movement with potentially historic power to influence the war
without end. In the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist assault on
our country, Americans will not stomach the images of other victims
of terrorism.
"All War Is Terrorism" read
a sign at the April 20 peace march. This is the truth and strength
of the movement that the march represents.
Despite the continued deflated assessments
of the peace movement by the liberal pro-war crowd in the tradition
of World War I liberals described by Randolph Bourne and carried
on by writers like Jacob Weisberg, All War Is Terrorism is a
truism that more and more Americans will apply to the war without
end, the Bush/Sharon doctrine -- providing the margin of life
for those in the sight of American/Israeli guns.
Mike Leon
is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His stories have appeared
nationally in The Progressive, In These Times and CounterPunch.
He can be reached at: maleon@terracom.net
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