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Omar Barghouti - Iman al-Hams was a 13-year old refugee schoolgirl who was executed—after being wounded—by an Israeli platoon commander on the sad sands of Rafah. After a bullet hit her leg, and Iman fell, the officer went over to her, saw that she was bleeding from her wounds, and shot her twice in the head to “confirm the killing.”. A cursory army investigation later cleared him of any “unethical” conduct, as is customary. In a flash, Israel proved to the world—yet again—that it is not only intransigent in its patent and consistent violation of international law, but also incapable of adhering to the most fundamental principles of moral behavior. But why, someone may protest, should we judge Israel based on this one incident, as heinous as it may be? A brief look at Israel’s recent record of purposely targeting Palestinian children will provide a compelling response.
Phil Rockstroh - As doomed as the drought-dessicated cornstalks, the lives of the sons and daughters of moonshine-makers are now decimated by crystal meth and crack cocaine. Dust squalls in the dry fields; the future burns to crack ash. The swamp has receded: Bear and bobcat are gone. Convenience stores, Wal*Mart superstores, strip malls and fast food joints choke the landscape where tenant farmers once struggled to survive. The surrounding swamplands were once astoundingly beautiful. Even strangling vines of wisteria draped their dying hosts in exquisite purple blossoms. But, in the eyes of the human inhabitants of land, the beauty was only incidental - superfluous - only a relentless drive to survive was needed. All else fell away.
Omayma Abdel-Latif - The West explains everything happening in Muslim countries by use of an ideological construct of cultural and religious difference. Hence its obsession with ideas that if democracy cannot take root then it is because of Islam or Arab tribalism; if men and women are not provided with equal opportunities it is because Islam has decreed it; if there is violence and conflict it is a result of the fanatic tendencies that exist among Muslims, etc. And, as if the effect were mirrored, we are told that Muslims reject our culture and hate us because of our values. Yet opinion polls carried out in the Middle East repeatedly show that any negative sentiments harboured towards the West have a basically political foundation, alongside which there is an enormous desire for liberty, for a democratisation process and for states governed by law, none of which are perceived as incompatible with Islam.
Brian Cloughley - It isn’t often you can have a real belly-laugh about testimony to the US House International Relations Committee. Most of these depositions are pompous and boring and almost nobody reads the material, anyway. But the testimony to the Subcommittee on the Middle East in July by Mira R Ricardel, Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy was different. It was pompous, of course - but some of the detail was far from boring. The subject of Ms Ricardel’s sworn statement was the country of Uzbekistan, and she produced a travesty of morality that at first reading might seem to be satire - perhaps an exuberant and very funny caricature of what House Committee testimony so often is. Alas, it wasn’t intended to be a parody.
Serge Halimi - The polls in America next week will be as much a referendum on the current administration as an election. Bush has two rare, if not unique, distinctions: he was elected even though he received fewer votes than his opponent and he is the son of a former president. His enthronement was less democratic than dynastic. The election result conferred no particular mandate on him, and certainly no endorsement for a terrible leap to the right, an imperial inflection of the international order or the militarisation of American society and foreign policy. The Democrats prefer to attribute these dramatic shifts within the country to some “vast rightwing conspiracy” involving the media and the Supreme Court. But that ignores the way that President Clinton left behind him a party in disarray, without any clear plan and in a minority in the House of Representatives, the Senate and in the states.
Dahr Jamail - The United States of America had the support of every country on the globe after the events of September 11, 2001. Today, anti-American sentiment around the world is higher than it has ever been. In April, I spoke with a man there who was managing a small clinic inside besieged Fallujah. He hadn’t slept in days because of the incessant influx of casualties from US aggression. “For 48 years I believed in democracy and the good spirit of the American government,” he said while bombs from US warplanes blasted into yet another part of the city, “but now I know it took me 48 years to wake up to the fact that they are a brutal, heartless empire. A government-led empire which cares nothing about the Iraqi people. It has taken my entire life, but I am not asleep to this fact any longer.”
David R. Hoffman - The Bill of Rights was designed by America’s founding fathers to serve as a “check-and-balance” between the government and the governed. Unfortunately, as prescient as these founders were, they resided in an agrarian culture and therefore did not foresee the impact that industrialization and the private economic sector would have on people’s ability to exercise their rights and freedoms. Fear of losing employment for advocating “unpopular” ideas, fear of censorship by a corporate-controlled media more devoted to enhancing their profits and promoting their agendas than serving the public interest, and fear of “civil law,” where monetary damages can be assessed against individuals or groups engaged in speech activities, have incessantly transformed the Bill of Rights into a litany of impotent platitudes.
Pepe Escobar, Asia Times - Whether it was poetic justice or yet one more instance of hubris, in the end there was indeed an “October surprise”. Call it the WMD-lite scandal: the disappearance of 380 tons of dual-use explosives in Iraq. Certainly Republican Machiavelli-in-charge Karl Rove didn’t see this surprise coming - hitting the Bush administration like a jet converted into a missile. Now the neo-cons and Pentagon civilians are scrambling like mad trying to cover US President George W Bush’s back and defuse yet another spectacular blunder. Even the best spin from the Bush administration will leave it looking incompetent, but the crucial facts about the whole affair are that the Pentagon knew that 380 tons of high explosives were stored at al-Qaqaa, but securing them were less of a priority than securing the country’s oil industry.
Linda S. Heard - Let’s face it. Bush’s survival as president depends on America facing either real or imaginary enemies. The “Sept. 11 nineteen” were the ones who attacked but they are inconveniently dead. The eccentric Bin Laden served as the perfect personification of “evil” to oil the road to Kabul, only to be replaced by George W’s personal bogeyman Saddam Hussein, his father’s nemesis. So now that Saddam is watering plants in his jail between penning romance novels, another “evildoer” had to be paraded. This time, it’s the alleged one time Osama follower Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. There is some dispute as to whether he is actually alive and still sports a wooly balaclava, but the purveyors of fear are sure about one thing: He scoots around the so-called Sunni “Triangle of Death” planning his dastardly agenda amid women, children and babies.
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