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April 9, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
April 8, 2002
David
Vest
From
Birmingham to Nashville:
The Making of Tammy Wynette
Rick Giombetti
Paxil, Suicide and Science
Dr. Neve
Gordon
Letter
to an IDF Colonel:
How Did You Become
a War Criminal?
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's Top 10 CDs
Jordy
Cummings
Not
in My Name Anymore
Gavin Keeney
Bush and the Middle East:
Mouth Wide Shut
Edward
Said
The
Future of Palestine
April 7, 2002
Beth Daoud
Accompanying Ambulances
in Bethlehem
Nancy
Stohlman
After
the Invasion:
The Search for Bread
Among the Ruins
Thomas Mountain
"Yellow Peril" In Hawai'i:
Judge Orders Chains and Shackles for Chinese Witnesses
Tariq
Ali
Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?
April 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
War, Snake Oil and Circuses
Viktor
Litovkin
Russian
Generals Raise Questions About Pentagon Victories in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
CIA Survey of Iraqi Airfields
May Herald Attack
Walt Brasch
Oil
Slick George:
Bush-whacking the Environment
Ralph Nader
Campaign Finance Sham
Sam Bahour
The
Blind Leading the Criminal
Bill Christison:
A Former CIA Official on
Oil and the Middle East
April 5, 2002
Charmaine
Seitz
In
Ramallah: The Grueling Reoccupation Grinds On
Nancy Stohlman
The Invasion of Bethlehem
and Our Tax Dollars at Work
Beth Daoud
The
Siege of Bethlehem:
"What Do You Mean God Is Punishing Me?"
Fareed Marjaee:
Demonizing Iran
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Philip
Morris to Canada:
"Drop Dead"
Alex Lynch
Tampa Campus Mirrors
Middle East Strife
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
April 2, 2002
Uri Avnery
Murdering Arafat?
Jeff Chang
Is
Protest Music Dead?
Lev Grinberg
Israel's State Terrorism
Norman
Madarasz
Bullying
Brazil
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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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
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Reviews of Gore:
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April 9, 2002
Israelis and Indians
By Michael Neumann
Palestinian tactics are often attacked or defended
on dubious grounds. Whether these tactics are terrorist is irrelevant;
some terrorism is defensible, some not. The same applies to whether
the acts are murders. Whether others are bigger terrorists or
murderers is also irrelevant; two wrongs don't make a right.
Whether Israelis have committed crimes is not directly relevant
either; that they have committed crimes is not sufficient to
justify killing people, civilians, who have not committed them.
The problem, as anyone will tell you,
is that Palestinians deliberately kill civilians. You would think,
then, that we would never do such a thing. Maybe not. Those who
conducted strategic bombing raids against Nazi Germany, or for
that matter those who set speed limits on our highways, did not.
These actions, it seems, were fine. Bombs would definitely stray
into civilian areas; lower speed limits would definitely mean
fewer children killed and maimed in accidents. We knew this with
certainty, but we didn't *intend* these consequences. Apparently
this makes us far better than the Palestinians. The scholastically
fine distinction between deliberately killing civilians and knowingly
killing civilians has become, it seems, a moral chasm.
Sometimes, though, we treat the deliberate
killing of civilians with reverence, or at least feel a special
moral pride in our refusal to condemn it. The best examples are
from American history. We have not forgotten that American Indians
deliberately killed civilians, including children, and sometimes
as a policy. But no one demands an apology from contemporary
American Indian leaders; quite the reverse. Nor is this simply
a matter of the silly business of apologies or other manifestations
of political correctness. (If political correctness is involved,
it comes from focusing on the warfare of 1850-1890, when the
whites were the worst killers, not on the earlier periods when
things were more even.) Why then, do we keep silent about these
presumably awful crimes? Why don't we rub them in the faces of
our children, so that they will never forget that such presumed
evils presumably tainted our land?
It is necessary to put the question more
sharply to exclude weasely answers. The Indians sometimes murdered
innocent civilians, including children. These acts were right,
wrong, or morally indifferent. Which were they?
I can't see that they were morally indifferent,
can you? Were they wrong? If so, they must have been awfully
wrong, because they involved murdering children. Is that what
we want to say?
I suggest not. I suggest the acts were
terrible, cruel, and ultimately justified. My reasons are familiar
to everyone. The Indians' very existence as a people was threatened.
More than threatened; their society was doomed without resistance.
They had no alternative. Moreover, every single white person,
down to the children, was an enemy, a being which, allowed to
live, would contribute to the destruction of the Indians' collective
existence.
The Indians had no chance of defeating
the whites by conventional military means. So their only resort
was to hit soft targets and do the maximum damage. That wasn't
just the right thing to do from their point of view. It was the
right thing to do, period, because the whites had no business
whatever coming thousands of miles to destroy the Indian people.
The comparisons with the situation of
the Palestinians are beyond obvious. To start, what I have written
sneaks in some misconceptions. There were no people called "the
Indians". They were diverse, as cultures and as individuals,
some peaceful, some warlike, some responsible for the massacres,
some not. It was, of course, the whites who lumped them together
and demonized them (just as this sentence does to the whites).
The Israelis kind of do that when they destroy the houses of
old women and blockade cities to the point of starvation and
medical catastrophe. And when anyone supports the Israelis, they
are responsible for this sort of collective 'punishment', even
if they don't - as they often do - indulge in the same coarse
generalizations.
As for the other points of resemblance,
not only Israeli, but much non-Israeli Jewish propaganda does
its best to conceal them. But concealment is impossible. Guess
what? The Palestinians didn't travel thousands of miles to dispossess
the Jews. It was the other way around. Often the Jews had very
pressing reasons to leave Europe. So did the whites who settled
in North America. And both groups of settlers couldn't quite
take in what they saw: that gee, there were other people already
there, and the land was theirs. When possible, both engaged in
sleazy land deals to get their foothold; when not, force was
used. But always there was no question: the whole land would
be theirs, and the state to be constructed would be their state.
Both groups of settlers somehow contrived,
despite these goals, to believe that they wanted nothing but
to live in peace with their 'neighbors'- neighbors, of course,
because they had already taken some of their land. And sure,
they did want peace, just as Hitler wanted peace: on his terms.
The most casual survey of Israeli politics indicates that mainstream,
official, respectable Jewish opinion asserts an absolute right
to Israel's present boundaries, and at the very least would never
abandon the continually expanding settlements. What is considered
extreme Jewish opinion, which asserts rights over the entire
area occupied by Palestine, is not the Israeli extreme. The far
right in Israel claims a territory that stretches as far as Kuwait
and southern Turkey. This matters, because, given Israel's fragmented
politics, the extreme right wields a power out of proportion
to its numbers. The conclusion must be that Israel, as a collective
entity, wants peace with all the sincerity of, say, General Custer.
Like the Indians, the Palestinians have
nowhere to go. All the Arab states either hate them, or hate
having them there. And, like Indians, Arabs and Palestinians
are not all alike: do we scratch our heads and wonder why, when
the Cherokee were kicked off their land, they didn't just join
the Apache or Navaho? Like the Indians, the Palestinians have
not the slightest chance of injuring, let alone defeating Israel
through conventional military tactics. Like the whites, every
single Israeli Jew, down to and including the children, are instruments
wielded against the Palestinian people.
Of course the two situations aren't quite
analogous. Things are clearer in the case of Israel, where virtually
every able-bodied adult civilian is at least an army reservist,
and every Jewish child will grow up to be one. And the American
settlers never spent years proclaiming how happy they would be
with the land they had before embarking on a campaign to take
the rest of it. One might add that the current situation of the
Palestinians is more like that of the Indians in 1880-1890 than
earlier, because the Palestinians have lost much more than half
of their original land.
The Palestinians don't set out to massacre
children, that is, they don't target daycare centers. (Nor do
they scalp children, but according to the BBC, that's what Israel's
clients did in Sabra and Shatila.) They merely hit soft targets,
and this sometimes involves the death of children. But, like
anyone, they will kill children to prevent the destruction of
their society. If peoples have any right of self-preservation,
this is justified. Just as Americans love to do, the Palestinians
are "sending a message": you really don't want to keep
screwing with us. We will do anything to stop you. And if the
only effective way of stopping their mortal enemies involved
targeting daycare centers, that would be justified too. No people
would do anything less to see they did not vanish from the face
of the earth.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
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