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Guest Editorial by Media Lens
As anyone who has worked in a modern corporation will know, the people working in those corporations are good, caring people. It?s just that, in their work, they are required to obey a system of economic logic that subordinates human and animal suffering to short-term profit. They are decent, civilized people -? their actions result in mass suffering and death. It is wrong to think that evil comes with a black hat, horns, scarred face, handle-bar moustache, or even mad, staring eyes. Endless testimony has documented the banal nature of evil. Men, women and children are generally burned alive, not by grinning monsters, but by fresh-faced kids pushing throttles, raising flaps and pressing bomb releases.
Uri Avnery
One of the Israeli newspapers, Haaretz, put the two events on the front page: the 100th anniversary of the death of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, and the judgment of the International Court of Justice, which declared the Israeli Separation Wall illegal. This coincidence may seem fortuitous. What connection could there possibly be between a historical anniversary and the latest topical event? But there is a connection. It is expressed in one sentence written by Herzl in Der Judenstaat, the book that became the cornerstone of Zionism. This is what it said: “There (in Palestine) we shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism.” This sentence could easily be written today.
Abid Ullah Jan
We need to understand the “-ism” and “ists” in simple words before we apply these suffixes to the complex issues. Margaret H. Parkinson, an expatriate New Zealander associated with Dunedin Methodists, has defined “ists” and “-ism” in a beautiful way. She gave the example of the enormous stretches of tulip fields, spreading like a carpet with rows of different colors. There are the occasional yellow tulip scattered among the red or stray pinks and reds among the yellows - apparently “out of sync.” These stray colors are invisible until we focus and specifically look for them. The question that strikes the mind is: Were they accidents or simply “the way things are”? It is very easy to think of differences as mistakes, and even crimes, when we further zoom into some serious issues. A yellow tulip among a sea of red?
James Brooks
"What the army used here yesterday was not tear gas. We know what tear gas is, what it feels like. That was something totally different . . . When we were still a long way off from where the bulldozers were working, they started shooting things like this one. Black smoke came out. Anyone who breathed it lost consciousness immediately, more than a hundred people. They remained unconscious for nearly 24 hours. One is still unconscious, at Rapidiya Hospital in Nablus. They had high fever and their muscles became rigid. Some needed urgent blood transfusion. Now, is this a way of dispersing a demonstration, or is it chemical warfare?”
Naomi Klein
Fury is an entirely appropriate response to a system that sends young people to kill other young people in a war that never should have been waged. Yet the American right is forever trying to pathologize anger as something menacing and abnormal, dismissing war opponents as hateful and, the latest slur, “wild-eyed.” This is much harder to do when victims of wars begin to speak for themselves: No one questions the wildness in the eyes of a mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter, or the fury of a soldier who knows that he is being asked to kill and die needlessly. Many Iraqis who have lost loved ones to foreign aggression have responded by resisting the occupation. Now, victims are starting to organize themselves inside the countries that are waging the war.
Scott Ritter
The battle for Iraq’s sovereign future is a battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. As things currently stand, it appears that victory will go to the side most in tune with the reality of the Iraqi society of today: the leaders of the anti-USA resistance. Not only has the United States failed to put into place a viable government to replace the CPA in the aftermath of the so-called “transfer of sovereignty,” but more importantly, it continues to misidentify the true nature of the Iraqi insurgency. As a consequence, the resistance will inevitably continue to flourish and grow until no force can defeat it, Iraqi or American.
Ian Douglas
One would hardly believe one’s eyes, but seemingly last Thursday saw the opening of the “trial of the century” - Saddam Hussein and cohorts hauled before a semester abroad version of Court TV. Dressed by his American captors in an “off-the- rack” suit conspicuously missing a necktie, rendered “suddenly ordinary” in the perceptive words of one of the few Western journalists permitted to attend, Hussein, against all odds, actually struck a few chords of sympathy around the Arab world. He tried to kill daddy, now junior will do away with him. To the decade-long debacle that future historians will doubtless see as the greatest political and financial scandal of our times the United States is bent on compounding the fleecing of Iraq with a travesty of justice that adds insult to injury upon ordinary Iraqis.
Guest Editorial by MIFTAH
Those who think that Palestinian leaders lack the will and the political savvy to organize effective peaceful protests against Israeli occupation would do well to visit a bustling tent off the Ar-Ram checkpoint on the road between Jerusalem and Ramallah, in which an extraordinary sit-in hunger strike, called five days ago by Dr. Azmi Bishara, the charismatic Israeli-Arab political leader and intellectual, is gathering momentum exponentially. Whether the strikers will eventually achieve their stated goal of bringing to an end Israel?s construction of the separation wall is debatable, but it is clear, from the conviction expressed by them, that they believe strongly enough in their cause to risk their lives for it.
Alex Contreras Baspineiro
The upcoming referendum in Bolivia has accomplished what various neoliberal governments, including military dictatorships, even the United States? own policy, could not: dividing the popular movement and challenging its leaders. A great question mark now hangs over this country?s future. A binding referendum ? described by some in the labor movement as “no more than a consolidation of the privileges awarded to multinational corporations” - will be held on July 18th to decide the fate of the country?s fossil fuels. Judging by the mood in the country, the issue looks set to be a major landmark in the country?s unstable recent history.
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