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May 3, 2002
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
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:
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
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A Pocket Guide to
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May
3, 2002
Democracy and Religious
Fascism
by Arundhati Roy
Last night a friend from Baroda called. Weeping.
It took her fifteen minutes to tell me what the matter was. It
wasn't very complicated. Only that Sayeeda, a friend of hers,
had been caught by a mob. Only that her stomach had been ripped
open and stuffed with burning rags. Only that after she died,
someone carved 'OM' on her forehead.
Precisely which Hindu scripture preaches
this?
Our Prime Minister justified this as
part of the retaliation by outraged Hindus against Muslim 'terrorists'
who burned alive 58 Hindu passengers on the Sabarmati Express
in Godhra. Each of those who died that hideous death was someone's
brother,  someone's mother, someone's
child. Of course they were.
Which particular verse in the Quran required
that they be roasted alive?
The more the two sides try and call attention
to their religious differences by slaughtering each other, the
less there is to distinguish them from one another. They worship
at the same altar. They're both apostles of the same murderous
god, whoever he is. In an atmosphere so vitiated, for anybody,
and in particular the Prime Minister, to arbitrarily decree exactly
where the cycle started is malevolent and irresponsible.
Right now we're sipping from a poisoned
chalice: a flawed democracy laced with religious fascism. Pure
arsenic.
What shall we do? What can we do?
We have a ruling party that's haemorrhaging.
Its rhetoric against Terrorism, the passing of POTA, the sabre-rattling
against Pakistan (with the underlying nuclear threat), the massing
of almost a million soldiers on the border on hair-trigger alert,
and most dangerous of all, the attempt to communalise and falsify
school history text-books--none of this has prevented it from
being humiliated in election after election. Even its old party
trick--the revival of the Ram mandir plans in Ayodhya--didn't
quite work out. Desperate now, it has turned for succour to the
state of Gujarat.
Gujarat, the only major state in India
to have a BJP government has, for some years, been the petri
dish in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate political
experiment. Last month, the initial results were put on public
display.
Within hours of the Godhra outrage, the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal put into motion
a meticulously planned pogrom against the Muslim community. Officially
the number of dead is 800. Independent reports put the figure
at well over 2,000. More than a hundred and fifty thousand people,
driven from their homes, now live in refugee camps. Women were
stripped, gang-raped, parents were bludgeoned to death in front
of their children. Two hundred and forty dargahs and 180 masjids
were destroyed--in Ahmedabad the tomb of Wali Gujarati, the founder
of the modern Urdu poem, was demolished and paved over in the
course of a night. The tomb of the musician Ustad Faiyaz Ali
Khan was desecrated and wreathed in burning tyres. Arsonists
burned and looted shops, homes, hotels, textiles mills, buses
and private cars. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs.
A mob surrounded the house of former
Congress MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffri. His phone calls to the Director-General
of Police, the Police Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, the
Additional Chief Secretary (Home) were ignored. The mobile police
vans around his house did not intervene. The mob broke into the
house. They stripped his daughters and burned them alive. Then
they beheaded Ehsan Jaffri and dismembered him. Of course it's
only a coincidence that Jaffri was a trenchant critic of Gujarat
Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, during his campaign for the Rajkot
Assembly by-election in February.
Across Gujarat, thousands of people made
up the mobs. They were armed with petrol bombs, guns, knives,
swords and <tridents.Apart> from the VHP and Bajrang Dal's
usual lumpen constituency, Dalits and Adivasis took part in the
orgy. Middle-class people participated in the looting. (On one
memorable occasion a family arrived in a Mitsubishi Lancer.)
The leaders of the mob had computer-generated cadastral lists
marking out Muslim homes, shops, businesses and even partnerships.
They had mobile phones to coordinate the action. They had trucks
loaded with thousands of gas cylinders, hoarded weeks in advance,
which they used to blow up Muslim commercial establishments.
They had not just police protection and police connivance, but
also covering fire.
While Gujarat burned, our Prime Minister
was on MTV promoting his new poems. (Reports say cassettes have
sold a hundred thousand copies.) It took him more than a month--and
two vacations in the hills--to make it to Gujarat. When he did,
shadowed by the chilling Mr Modi, he gave a speech at the Shah
Alam refugee camp. His mouth moved, he tried to express concern,
but no real sound emerged except the mocking of the wind whistling
through a burned, bloodied, broken world. Next we knew, he was
bobbing around in a golf-cart, striking business deals in Singapore.
The killers still stalk Gujarat's streets.
The lynch mob continues to be the arbiter of the routine affairs
of daily life: who can live where, who can say what, who can
meet who, and where and when. Its mandate is expanding quickly.
From religious affairs, it now extends to property disputes,
family altercations, the planning and allocation of water resources...
(which is why Medha Patkar of the NBA was assaulted).
Muslim businesses have been shut down.
Muslim people are not served in restaurants. Muslim children
are not welcome in schools. Muslim students are too terrified
to sit for their exams. Muslim parents live in dread that their
infants might forget what they've been told and give themselves
away by saying 'Ammi!' or 'Abba!' in public and invite sudden
and violent death.
Notice has been given: this is just the
beginning.
Arundhati Roy
is the author of Power
Politics, the Booker Prize-winning novel The
God of Small Things and The
Cost of Living. This column originally appeared in Outlook
India.
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