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Jane Lampman
For Ray Sanders and his wife, Sharon, reading Hal Lindsey’s apocalyptic bestseller, “The Late Great Planet Earth,” was a life changing experience. “That awakened our understanding to Israel and its prophetic role in the Last Days,” Mr. Sanders explains. The Sanders’ now live and work from Jerusalem, marshalling support from evangelical Christians around the world, to fulfill what they see as their role in an unfolding final drama. They and other Christian Zionists, whose ranks are estimated at 20 million in the USA alone, have in the past two decades poured millions of dollars of donations into Israel, formed a tight alliance with the Likud and other Israeli politicians seeking an expanded “Greater Israel,” and mobilized grass-roots efforts to get the USA to adopt a similar policy.
Walden Bello
Over the last year, I have been preoccupied, as so many of us have, with one thing, Iraq. Iraq, as Bob Woodward puts it in his book Plan of Attack, has “sucked all the oxygen out of the system.” It is the central event of our time, our Spanish Civil War, our Vietnam, and everything else seems to be put on hold both here and in other parts of the world until there is a just and decisive resolution to the terrible situation created by the US invasion and occupation of that country.
Hal Crowther
I used to take a drink on occasion with a network newsman famed for his impenetrable calm--his apparent pulse rate that of a large mammal in deep hibernation--and in an avuncular moment he advised me that I’d do all right, in the long run, if I could only avoid the kind of journalism committed to the keyboard “with trembling fingers.” I recognized the wisdom of this advice and endeavored over the years to write as little as possible when my blood pressure was soaring and my face was streaked with tears. The lava flows of indignation ebb predictably with age and hardening arteries, and nearing three-score I thought I’d never have to take another tranquilizer--or a double bourbon--to keep my fingers steady on the keys. I never imagined 2004.
Bilal El-Amine
There are close to 400,000 registered Palestinian refugees in Lebanon living in 13 camps ranging in size from 1,000 to 45,000. They are carefully (and deliberately, according to some refugees) distributed throughout the country but well away from the border with Palestine. On a recent visit to Lebanon where I?m from, a friend who works with Palestinian refugees arranged for a group of us to visit Shatila camp in Beirut. We asked for a general history of the camp before we were taken to see it. So she told us her story, a personal account of what she endured and saw.
Louis Werner
The news that Jewish historian Raphael Patai’s book The Arab Mind, a sex-obsessed cultural stereotyping of the Arabs, is considered a must-read by Washington neo-conservatives is not surprising. It is, after all, taught at the US Army War College, and its new edition has an introduction written by Colonel Norvell DeAtkine, whose academic specialties are listed as terrorism, urban warfare, and “operations other than war”. So I suppose it is also unsurprising that the book was apparently used as a field manual by US Army Intelligence in Abu Ghraib prison, whose interrogators inferred the bizarre lesson from Patai’s chapter on Arab sexual shame that recommends forced nakedness, transvestitism, and female-on-male sado-masochism as the best way to get Iraqi prisoners to cooperate and talk.
Paul Kelbie
There was never any doubt what Gordon Gentle would end up doing when he left school. Both his mother’s brothers had served with the Royal Highland Fusiliers in Northern Ireland, and for the quiet, 6ft 2in Celtic fan it seemed there was never an alternative but to follow in their footsteps. School friends teased him over his military ambitions, saying he was too kind and good-natured to be a soldier. He was called Gentle, after all. But the teenager had the strength of character to ignore them, and enlisted with the regiment last year. On Wednesday, the same friends, who nicknamed him him “Soft”, will gather to honour a 19-year-old who joined the Army to see the world but ended up being the 60th and last British soldier to be killed in Iraq before the handover of power to the new Iraqi government.
Gwynne Dyer
The Bush administration’s policy on Cuba recently took a new turn. From now on, Cuban-Americans will be able to visit the island only once every three years, not annually, and the amount of money they can take with them will be cut by more than two-thirds. Other Americans will continue to be banned from going to Cuba at all. Those defying the ban risk up to ten years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Military aircraft will be deployed in the skies near Cuba to push American TV and radio propaganda broadcasts through Cuban jamming. This stuff is obviously not going to shake Fidel Castro’s hold on power, so why did Bush do it? The “Miami Herald” published the complete answer in late May: “The new Cuba rules are a cold, poll-driven calculation that has less to do with democracy-building in Havana than with vote-counting in Miami.”
Palestinians Declare a New Intifada Has Begun
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) extra-judicially executed the founder and spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas Sheikh Ahmad Yasin while leaving a mosque after he performed his predawn prayers in Gaza City early Monday. Pandora?s box has been opened. We are counting down” until the next Palestinian attack “and the question is how many Israelis will be killed,” said Yossi Beilin the former Israeli justice minister and co-author of the unofficial Geneva Initiative. Hamas vindicated Beilin?s warning. The Hamas leadership said, “Sharon has opened the gates of hell. And nothing will stop us from cutting off his head”.
John Pilger
The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth. What is different today is that the weak have learned how to attack the strong, and the western crusaders’ most recent colonial terrorism (as many as 55,000 Iraqis killed) exposes “us” to retaliation. The source of much of this danger is Israel. A creation, then guardian of the west’s empire in the Middle East, the Zionist state remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined.
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