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Ramzy Baroud
As a token of goodwill, we shall presuppose that President George W. Bush’s ardent calls for democracy in the Arab world don’t envisage politically motivated, court determined elections, like that of his. Nor, shall we assume that the President was fervently calling for a racial/religious democracy that is maintained through exclusiveness and customary acts of ethnic cleaning, so that the demographic composition of a state might be sustained, like in the case of Israel. But goodwill alone can hardly prepare one for the paradoxes that the president’s democracy calls so starkly infuse.
Pueng Vongs
You may assume that, mindful of the widespread claim that the ?war on terror? is really a war against Islam, the military authorities would be especially careful to give all the respect they could to their own Muslim Chaplain serving at Guantanamo Bay. You would be wrong. Captain James Yee has been arrested, placed in the now trademark ?restraints?, interrogated at length, and accused of being an Al-Qaeda spy. After the charges were finally proved groundless last week, the military authorities are attempting to justify their actions by substituting new claims in an attempt to portray Yee as a perpetrator of sex-crimes.
B. Michael
A lot of “separating” can be achieved with 3,000 km (2,000 miles) of barbed-wire: separating livestock from its owners, olives from their harvesters, vines from their pickers, a doctor from his patients, a worker from his place of work, a teacher from his students. Especially the farmer from his land. One kind of separation will not be obtained by the thousands of barbed kilometres - separating the suicide-bomber from his victims.
Mark Mazower
A German MP makes the absurd claim that Jews today bear responsibility for the war excesses of Jewish Bolsheviks almost a hundred years ago, and the commander of German Special Forces publicly agrees. An opinion poll suggests that 60% of Europeans think Israel is a threat to world peace. But whilst there is little doubt that some parts of European societies are again seeing a rise in anti-Semitic activity, a more than cursory glance at the issue reveals that sentiment amongst the masses is of a totally different kind to that which preceded the Holocaust.
James Brooks
Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories passed through a profound transformation during the last several months, as the West Bank “security fence” gradually revealed itself to be the backbone of a comprehensive new system of land theft, imprisonment, collective punishment? and worse. The question is not whether it is a “political fence” or a “security fence,” but whether it is an engine of ethnic cleansing.
Includes link at the bottom to the latest and most comprehensive map of the apartheid wall
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
What happened in Georgia last weekend was no spontaneous popular uprising by a disaffected, furious populace rebelling against a tyrant but rather, a campaign orchestrated from abroad to place a pro-west, pro-NATO sycophant on the throne in Tbilisi.
Helen Thomas
The raid by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi officials on an Arab television network bureau in Baghdad and the ban on its broadcasts hardly fits my idea of how to spread democracy in the Middle East. Isn’t that the first thing dictators do—shut down broadcast outlets and newspapers? For those in power, tolerating a free press is difficult, even in a democracy. As a foreign occupier in Iraq, we are proving that it is intolerable.
Robert Jensen and Sam Husseini
USA military base in Baghdad. Intelligence analysts around the world are studying the videotapes. “It certainly looked and sounded like him, but we get so few glimpses at Bush in real-life situations that it is hard to tell,” said one operative from a Western intelligence agency. People who know Bush said it appeared to him. “That’s him, all right,” said one long-time associate.
Manuel Valenzuela
Contrary to White House, Pentagon and corporate media propaganda, Iraq today is an amalgam of Saddam loyalists, a few foreign fighters and an ever-growing number of ordinary civilians joining those which Bush calls “terrorists”, but who in reality are nationalists and insurgents fighting a resistance against our Iraqifation. To Iraqis and the rest of the world, they would be called “freedom fighters,” much like the ones clandestinely trained, supplied and supported by the United States in their resistance against the Soviets in 1980?s Afghanistan.
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