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April 30, 2002
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 Memphis Blues Again:
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The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
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April 30, 2002
Apartheid in the Holy Land
by Desmond Tutu
In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters
were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the
side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting
injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly
with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa.
I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.
What is not so understandable, not justified,
is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence.
I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land;
it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in
South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians
at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white
police officers prevented us from moving about.
On one of my visits to the Holy Land
I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I
could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements.
I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of
the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?
I have experienced Palestinians pointing
to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I
was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical
Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: "Our home was
over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied
by Israeli Jews."
My heart aches. I say why are our memories
so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their
humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the
home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned
their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions?
Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?
Israel will never get true security and
safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately
be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide
bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught
hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions
in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances
reach the injured.
The military action of recent days, I
predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace
Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.
Israel has three options: revert to the
previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians;
or - I hope - to strive for peace based on justice, based on
withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment
of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side
with Israel, both with secure borders.
We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful
transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible
to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come
to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?
My brother Naim Ateek has said what we
used to say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice,
pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."
But you know as well as I do that, somehow,
the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and
to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as
if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white,
despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about
that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on
security measures?
People are scared in this country [the
US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful
- very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's
world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government
was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini,
Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful,
but in the end they bit the dust.
Injustice and oppression will never prevail.
Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that
God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor,
the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes
judgment.
We should put out a clarion call to the
government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people
and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible.
We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because
it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together
as sisters and brothers.
Desmond Tutu is
the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa's
truth and reconciliation commission. This address was given at
a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts,
earlier this month.
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