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Daniel Patrick Welch - In Oz, the wizard is finally shown to be a tired old man in the corner manipulating machinery to create the impression of power. When Zod and his cohorts levelled the White House in Superman II, he saw through the stand-in for the president. “No one who commands so many could capitulate so quickly.” The real president comes out from a washroom next to the Oval Office - maybe the one Bill and Monica made famous, who knows? - and says: “I’m the one they’re protecting.” But what if the man in the corner is the actual Oz? What if the cover story is the bumbling fool, and when you pull back the curtain the actual embodiment of evil itself is staring you right in the face? This was the reaction I had when I saw just a glimpse of Dick Cheney during the vice-presidential debate on television.
Don Nash - My country is in serious violation of the Geneva Convention and the charter my country signed to become a participant with the United Nations. It is to our shame. The preemptive war being waged on Iraq that was initiated by George Bush, is illegal, it is immoral, and it is unjust. The military of my country is being used by lying politicians to commit cold blooded murder on innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. It is to our shame. Are the good people of the United States of America, to be considered by the world at large as no better than war-mongering savages? Without moral context, without moral authority, and without the good sense to recognize deceit by my nation’s leaders. It is to our shame.
Jonny Burnett and Dave Whyte - Legislation passed since 1997 by the UK government have created 28 new offences that apply exclusively to immigrants or those seeking asylum. That figure more than quadruples if we add in the number of new offences aimed at those seeking to employ, aid, or assist those designated ‘illegal’. Powers to enforce these laws include new powers to detain and imprison; the separation of children from their families; and the denial of welfare assistance. The insistence that failed asylum seekers will be made to work without pay while awaiting deportation should be read as a harbinger of the more extreme excesses of New Labour’s ‘workfare state’. It is this kind of explicitly xeno-racist reform that has prompted Amnesty to accuse the British government of failing to abide by the Geneva Convention.
Hafizur Rahman - They say that public men and women, particularly those managing affairs of state, are roughly divided into two types: hawks and doves. Unlike the hawks, the doves don’t go boasting about themselves, because somehow it is considered infra dig to be known as a dove. Not so long ago the expressions were widely used, but then after the end of the cold war, nobody was keen to be known as either. Now however, the policies of President Bush have revived the two terms and the hawks there are having a whale of a time. Last week I read in a Gulf newspaper that, in one of the cities there, a hunting hawk flew away with a cheque for a thousand dollars. While it was clearly stated in the report that the hawk was a bird, it was not clarified whether the bird was a hawk in the political sense also…
In the end, Darth Vader did not eat Robin alive (no Batman to the rescue). Much to the contrary. The cyclopic spinning machine is ruling that the only vice-presidential debate in the US election, between incumbent Dick Cheney and challenger John Edwards in Cincinnati on Tuesday, was a tie - but not if you consider the numerous Darth Vader instances of, euphemistically, “stretching the truth”. Cheney denied he had made a link between Saddam and the attacks of September 11, 2001. False. Cheney insisted on an “Iraqi track record of terror”. False. Cheney said the Bush administration “captured or killed thousands of al-Qaeda”. False. But it’s astonishing that in such a crucial debate there was no mention whatsoever of the key intersection between Cheney’s oil connections and the “war on terror”.
Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah - From the first days of what began as a peaceful uprising, to which Israel responded with one million bullets in the first month of protests, Israeli and American analysts have been declaring that the efforts to stop all resistance would soon succeed. A few more assassinations, a few more missiles, a few thousand more arrests, a bit more torture, a few hundred more demolitions, a little more hunger and darkness—and the Palestinians will get the message and realize that their best option is servitude under occupation. But by any standard, in a war between a colonial occupier and an indigenous people, the Palestinians are in a comparable state to those who have trodden this path before them.
Vladimir Ryzhkov - The new political system created by Putin in the wake of the Beslan disaster will have no legal foundation in the Constitution, and this will have disastrous consequences for the country. Nor will Kremlin-appointed governors enjoy legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Poll after poll has shown that a majority of Russians either don’t understand Putin’s proposals or don’t approve of them. Most voters want to carry on electing their leaders because they understand that elected officials care more for the interests of their constituents than appointed ones do. The Beslan tragedy made clear that the Kremlin-appointed leaders in Chechnya and Ingushetia have no connection with the people, and are therefore utterly impotent.
Juan Cole - U.S. President George W. Bush said last week that the Iraqis were refuting the pessimists, and he implied that things were improving in that country. What would the United States look like if it were in Iraq’s current situation? Violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent, proportionately, of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun shootings and aerial bombardments in just one week? That is a number greater than the deaths on Sept. 11, 2001. And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, mostly in Washington, the capital, but also in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City and San Francisco?
Maichael Tarazi - Support for one state in Israel/Palestine is hardly a radical idea; it is simply the recognition of the uncomfortable reality that Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories already function as a single state. In the words of one Palestinian farmer, you can’t unscramble an egg. But in this de facto state, 3.5 million Palestinian Christians and Muslims are denied the same political and civil rights as Jews. These Palestinians must drive on separate roads, in cars bearing distinctive license plates, and only to and from designated Palestinian areas. It is illegal for a Palestinian to drive a car with an Israeli license plate. These Palestinians, as non-Jews, neither qualify for Israeli citizenship nor have the right to vote in Israeli elections.
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