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Coming Soon! From Common Courage Press Recent Stories July 21, 2003 Bruce Jackson Third and Arizona, Santa Monica July 19 / 20, 2003 Arthur Mitzman Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable Than the Dot.com Bubble? Julian Bond We Shall be Heard Cynthia McKinney Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad Mel Goodman What is to be Done with the CIA? Jason Leopold Tenet Blames Wolfowitz Mickey Z. History Forgave Churchill Doug Giebel Impeachment as the Message Jon Brown Whipping the Post Mano Singham Cheney's Oil Maps Steven Sherman Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC Robin Philpot Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters Khaldoun Khelil Capturing Friedman Jeffrey St. Clair You Must Go Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed Lenni Brenner Sitting in with Mingus Vanessa Jones Three Dog Night Adam Engel Video Judas Video Poets' Basement Foley, Smith and Curtis Website of the Weekend Illegal Art   July 18, 2003 David Vest Drowning in Deep Doo-Doo Rahul Mahajan Deceit Runs Deep John Chuckman Enron-style Management in a Dangerous World Harold A. Gould The Bush-Musharraf Conclave Alvaro Angarita In the Eye of the Storm: Colombia's War on Journalists David Grenier Sovereignty and Solidarity in Indian Country...Rhode Island Dave Lindorff Bush and Hitler: a Response to the Wall Street Journal Website of the Day Murder of a Whistleblower? Timeline in David Kelly Affair   July 17, 2003 Ron Jacobs Sometimes Even the President of the United States Has to Stand Naked Lisa Walsh Thomas Bush Country: the Venom and Adulation of Ignorance Martin Schwarz Bush Pre-emptive Strike Doctrine is the Bane of Non-Proliferation Watchdogs Heidi Lypps Better Justice Through Chemistry? Forced Drugging and the Supreme Court Norman Madarasz Third Ways and Third Worlds: Lula at the Progressive Governance Conference Pankaj Mehta Criminalizing the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Marjorie Cohn Bush, War Lies & Impeachment: the Boy Who Cried Wolf Hammond Guthrie (Dis) Intelligence Revisited Website of the Day No Force, No Fraud: the Soul of Libertarianism July 16, 2003 Jason Leopold Wolfowitz Told White House to Hype Dubious Uranium Claims William Cook Defining Terrorism from the Top Down Elaine Cassel Judge Brinkema v. Ashcroft: She Whom Must Not Be Obeyed Jason Leopold How Can They Justify the War If WMDs Are Never Found? Linda Heard Bondage or Freedom? Raymond Barrett From Detroit to Basra Jeffrey St. Clair Back to the Future in Guatemala: The Return of Gen. Ríos Montt   July 15, 2003 Kathleen and Bill Christison Why We Resigned from VIPS Elaine Cassel Ashcroft's War on Legal Whistleblowers: the Ordeal of Jesselyn Radack Chris Floyd Barge Poles: Oil Wars and New Europe's Mercenaries Jason Leopold CIA Warned White House Last October that Niger Docs were Forgeries Gaius Publius Considering the Obvious: Fool Us Once, Fool Us Twise...Please John Troyer The Niger Syndrome Becky Gillette No Conspiracy at Coffeen Nature Preserve: a Response to David Orrr Uri Avnery The Bi-National State: The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb Website of the Day Cost of Iraq War   July 14, 2003 Lisa Taraki Hot Days in Ramallah Walter Brasch Bush: the Pretend Captain SOA Watch Training Colombia's Killers in the US Dan Bacher Yurok Tribe Denounces Klamath River Salmon Killers Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Intelligence Unglued Website of the Day Coalition for Democratic Rights and Civil Liberties July 12 / 13, 2003 Arthur Mitzman The Double Wall Before the Future Standard Schaefer The Coming Financial Reality: an Interview with Michael Hudson John Feffer A Fearful Symmetry: Washington and Pyongyang Ron Jacobs Shades of Gray in Iran Elaine Cassel Judicial Terrorism Against the Bill of Rights Tom Stephens Civil Liberties After 9/11 David Lindorff New White House Slogan: "Case Closed. Just Move On" Jason Leopold The Mini-War Against Iraq Prior to 9/11 Lee Sustar What's Behind the Crisis in Liberia? Mickey Z. AIDS Dissent and Africa Sam Hamod Semitic is a Language Group, Not a Race or Ethnic Group Ramzy Baroud Awaiting Justice on an Old Blanket Jeffrey St. Clair Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller Adam Engel Parable of the Lobbyist Robert Sanders A Review of Ralph Lopez's American Dream Poets' Basement Albert, Witherup, Guthrie   July 11, 2003 Conn Hallinan The Coin of Empire Tim Wise God Responds to Bush Mokhiber / Weissman The Two Faces of Bush in Africa Edward S. Herman Whitewashing Sandra Day O'Connor David Orr Coffeen-gate: What's Going on at the Sierra Club Foundation? David Lindorff An Iraq War & Occupation Glossary Website of the Day Dead Malls   July 10, 2003 Ron Jacobs Dealing with the Devil: the Bloody Profits of General Dynamics Sean Donahue Bush and the Paramillitaries: Coddling Terrorists in Colombia Yemi Toure Who Outted Bush in Afrika? Robert Jensen Politics and Sustainability: an Interview with Wes Jackson Ali Abunimah US Leaves Injured Iraqis Untreated Joanne Mariner Federal Courts, Not Military Commissions Website of the Day Electronic Iraq   July 9, 2003 David Lindorff Is the Media Finally Turning on Bush? David Krieger and Angela McCracken 10 Myths About Nuclear Weapons Mickey Z. Why Speak Out? Lee Sustar The Great Medicare Fraud John Chuckman The Worst Kind of Lie Gary Leupp "Pacifist" Japan and the Occupation of Iraq Website of the Day Hail to the Thief: Songs for the Bush Years   July 8, 2003 Elaine Cassel Bully on the Bench: the Pathological Dissents of Scalia Alan Maass Nights of Fire and Rage in Benton Harbor Chris Floyd Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag Linda S. Heard America's Kangaroo Justice Brian Cloughley They Tell Lies to Nodders Charles Sullivan Bush the Christian? Saul Landau The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age Website of the Day Occupation Watch   July 7, 2003 William Blum The Anti-Empire Report Harvey Wasserman The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head Ramzy Baroud Peace for All the Wrong Reasons Simon Jones What Progressives Should Think About Iran Lesley McCulloch Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh Uri Avnery The Draw Steve Perry Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3   July 4 / 6, 2003 Patrick Cockburn Dead on the Fourth of July Frederick Douglass What is Freedom to a Slave? Martha Honey Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation and Neglect Jeffrey St. Clair The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture Standard Schaefer Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004 Lenni Brenner Jefferson is for Today Elaine Cassel Fucking Furious on the Fourth Ben Tripp How Free Are We? Wayne Madsen A Sad Independence Day John Stanton Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War Jim Lobe Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment John Blair Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke Lisa Walsh Thomas Heavy Reckoning at Qaim David Vest Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite Adam Engel Queer as Grass Poets' Basement Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair Website of the Weekend The Lipstick Librarian   Hot Stories Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Elaine Cassel Civil Liberties Watch Michel Guerrin Embedded Photographer Says: "I Saw Marines Kill Civilians" Uzma Aslam Khan The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War: What America Says Does Not Go Paul de Rooij Arrogant Propaganda Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online Search CounterPunch

July 21, 2003 Rule by the Blind Imperial Arrogance and the Vile Stereotyping of Arabs By EDWARD SAID The great modern empires have never been held together only by military power. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian. France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa. The key element was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it in one's gaze, constructing its history from one's own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing. For a while this worked, as many local leaders believed--mistakenly--that cooperating with the imperial authority was the only way. But because the dialectic between the imperial perspective and the local one is adversarial and impermanent, at some point the conflict between ruler and ruled becomes uncontainable and breaks out into colonial war, as happened in Algeria and India. We are still a long way from that moment in American rule over the Arab and Muslim world because, over the last century, pacification through unpopular local rulers has so far worked. At least since World War II, American strategic interests in the Middle East have been, first, to ensure supplies of oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost the strength and domination of Israel over its neighbors. Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate. These ideas are by no means shared by the people who inhabit that empire, but that hasn't prevented the U.S. propaganda and policy apparatus from imposing its imperial perspective on Americans, whose sources of information about Arabs and Islam are woefully inadequate. Several generations of Americans have come to see the Arab world mainly as a dangerous place, where terrorism and religious fanaticism are spawned and where a gratuitous anti-Americanism is inculcated in the young by evil clerics who are anti-democratic and virulently anti-Semitic. In the U.S., "Arabists" are under attack. Simply to speak Arabic or to have some sympathetic acquaintance with the vast Arab cultural tradition has been made to seem a threat to Israel. The media runs the vilest racist stereotypes about Arabs--see, for example, a piece by Cynthia Ozick in the Wall Street Journal in which she speaks of Palestinians as having "reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors" and of Palestinian culture as "the life force traduced, cultism raised to a sinister spiritualism." Americans are sufficiently blind that when a Middle Eastern leader emerges whom our leaders like--the shah of Iran or Anwar Sadat--it is assumed that he is a visionary who does things our way not because he understands the game of imperial power (which is to survive by humoring the regnant authority) but because he is moved by principles that we share. Almost a quarter of a century after his assassination, Sadat is a forgotten and unpopular man in his own country because most Egyptians regard him as having served the U.S. first, not Egypt. The same is true of the shah in Iran. That Sadat and the shah were followed in power by rulers who are less palatable to the U.S. indicates not that Arabs are fanatics, but that the distortions of imperialism produce further distortions, inducing extreme forms of resistance and political self-assertion. The Palestinians are considered to have reformed themselves by allowing Mahmoud Abbas, rather than the terrible Yasser Arafat, to be their leader. But "reform" is a matter of imperial interpretation. Israel and the U.S. regard Arafat as an obstacle to the settlement they wish to impose on the Palestinians, a settlement that would obliterate Palestinian demands and allow Israel to claim, falsely, that it has atoned for its "original sin." Never mind that Arafat--whom I have criticized for years in the Arabic and Western media--is still universally regarded as the legitimate Palestinian leader. He was legally elected and has a level of popular support that no other Palestinian approaches, least of all Abbas, a bureaucrat and longtime Arafat subordinate. And never mind that there is now a coherent Palestinian opposition, the Independent National Initiative; it gets no attention because the U.S. and the Israeli establishment wish for a compliant interlocutor who is in no position to make trouble. As to whether the Abbas arrangement can work, that is put off to another day. This is shortsightedness indeed--the blind arrogance of the imperial gaze. The same pattern is repeated in the official U.S. view of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the other Arab states. Underlying this perspective is a long-standing view--the Orientalist view--that denies Arabs their right to national self-determination because they are considered incapable of logic, unable to tell the truth and fundamentally murderous. Since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery--and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is correct because "that's the way the Arabs are." That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel to the fire. We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy. Edward Said is a professor at Columbia University. He is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). Weekend Edition Features for July 19 / 20, 2003 Arthur Mitzman Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable Than the Dot.com Bubble? Julian Bond We Shall be Heard Cynthia McKinney Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad Mel Goodman What is to be Done with the CIA? Jason Leopold Tenet Blames Wolfowitz Mickey Z. History Forgave Churchill Doug Giebel Impeachment as the Message Jon Brown Whipping the Post Mano Singham Cheney's Oil Maps Steven Sherman Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC Robin Philpot Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters Khaldoun Khelil Capturing Friedman Jeffrey St. Clair You Must Go Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed Lenni Brenner Sitting in with Mingus Vanessa Jones Three Dog Night Adam Engel Video Judas Video Poets' Basement Foley, Smith and Curtis Website of the Weekend Illegal Art   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /