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M. Shahid Alam
We might glean a few insights about the semantics of the global order ? and the reality it tries to mask ? from the way in which the United States has framed the moral case against Saddam. Saddam’s unspeakable crime is that he has “tortured his own people.” He has “killed his own people.” He has “gassed his own people.” He has “poison-gassed his own people.” In all the accusations, Saddam stands inseparable from his own people. Rarely do his accusers charge that Saddam “tortured people,” “gassed people,” “gassed Iraqis,” or “killed Iraqis.” A google search for “gassed his own people” and “Saddam” produced 5980 hits. Another search for “gassed people” and Saddam produced only 276 hits.
Uri Avnery
It is no surprise that the establishment interpreted nothing new in Ariel Sharon?s speech setting out his plans for “unilateral actions” concerning the Occupied Territories. The commentators just did not understand what they had heard. That?s why they wrote things like “He did not say anything new”, “He has no plan”, “He is marking time”, “He is old and tired”, and the usual Washington reaction: “A positive step, but?” However, it is all nonsense. In his speech, Sharon outlined a whole, detailed ? and extremely dangerous ? plan.
William Hardiker
It appears that Saddam Hussein, ex-employee of the American Government, has been extracted from his metaphorical “haystack” in Iraq ? that is, if that which all the worlds media have leapt upon during the past week is true to appearances, rather than the equally feasible possibility that expert work, accomplished courtesy of high-tech “Hollywood-style” special effects teams, presented a long US incarcerated Saddam to domestic American and world media as a much needed Christmas present in the face of escalating Iraqi insurgencies.
Peter Preston
There’s a logic to these things. Muammar Gadafy, growing older, and his isolated Libya, growing poorer, were getting nothing worthwhile from the atomic bomb they hadn’t built yet or chemicals they had scant residual use for. Logic - and common sense - meant changing tack. Good for logic. But logic doesn’t stop there. What next? If weapons of mass destruction are a menace in unstable regions such as the Middle East, if their availability must be reduced, then logic begins to move us closer to the confrontation we never seek with the nuclear power we - let alone Messrs Bush and Blair - seldom mention: Israel.
Noam Chomsky
An indictment of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities would include not only his slaughter and gassing of Kurds in 1988 but also, rather crucially, his massacre of the Shiite rebels who might have overthrown him in 1991. At the time, Washington and its allies held the “strikingly unanimous view that whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country’s stability than did those who have suffered his repression,”
Hizb ut-Tahrir
Saddam is no different to any of the brutal secular dictators in the Muslim world such as Mubarak, Musharraf or Karimov. They are all backed financially and politically to the hilt by Western governments. Indeed without this Western support, the Muslims of these countries would have removed these tyrants long ago and made them prisoners. For Western leaders to now seek to claim the moral high ground in removing one of ‘their’ dictators is the height of hypocrisy!
Michael Brown
Ariel Sharon’s recent speech on the future for the Occupied Territories acknowledged there will be a Palestinian state, but said nothing about that state which Palestinians could latch on to as a sign of future peace. His vision for Israel seems to be one of constant siege, and his idea of Palestine fits very closely with the the Apartheid South African policy of state-supervised bantustans.
Mary Riddell
The symbol of this Christmas is the noose. Hang my son, says Ian Huntley’s mother. Hang Saddam, says almost everyone. As the great Judaeo-Christian feast approaches, the polarity between good and evil is stark. In modern replays of the Book of Genesis, conducted in settings as diverse as the Old Bailey, a spider hole near Tikrit and your local Odeon, light does not often vanquish darkness.
Paul Eisen
As the onslaught on the Palestinian people continues and the hundred-year conquest of Palestine enters what may be its final stages, efforts by the Israeli, Zionist and Jewish establishments to silence any remaining criticism of Israel and Zionism intensify. At the centre of these efforts is the claim that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism. Critics of Israel are warned that whilst like any other democratic state, Israel is open to criticism of its policies, any criticism of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is, by definition, anti-Semitic.
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