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A Special Report on the Presidential Elections Exclusively in the Print Edition CounterPunch How Progressive Challenges Have Been Killed Off Since LBJ; Gagging Fanny Lou Hamer; Eugene McCarthy on "a Peasants Rebellion;" Sabotaging McGovern; The Wreck of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition; Smearing Nader, Not Once But Three Times: by Alexander Cockburn; The Thieves of the Green Zone by Patrick Cockburn; Murder in Mississippi: Could John Doar Have Saved Cheney, Schwerner & Goodman by David Kotz. In May, CounterPunch Online was read by over 20 million viewers! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Sex, Drugs & the Blues! Serpents in the Garden CounterPunch's Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available Click here to purchase Today's Stories July 17, 2004 Gary Leupp Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is Must Reading   July 16, 2004 Dave Zirin Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay-Up Shervan Sardar Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws Ron Jacobs The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti-War Plank Robert Fisk Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Coffin Bombs in Baghdad Greg Moses The Forts of Iraq Mickey Z. Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV Dan Bacher A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes Dave Lindorff The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP, But a Movement in Shambles Paul McGeough Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood? Website of the Day 10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)   July 15, 2004 Heather Williams McMissing the Point: Supersize Me Crashes on Its Message Werther Iraq: Follow the Money Tom Crumpacker The Birds of Guantanamo Brian Cloughley What Does the Bush Regime Object To? Bill Christison Reorganize the CIA? Of Course, But... July 14, 2004 Jeffrey St. Clair Chronicle of a Nomination Foretold: the Green Deceivers Neve Gordon Of Socrates and the Apartheid Wall Diane Christian The Priesthood of Death Stefan Wray Who Benefits from Missing Data at Los Alamos Nuclear Lab? Josh Frank The Nader / Dean Debate Conn Hallinan Divide and Conquer as Imperial Rules Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Bring My Brother Home!: Class, War and Education Website of the Day Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of US Empire   July 13, 2004 Ray McGovern The CIA and Iraq: an Intelligence Debacle...and Worse Mark Donham The Sierra Club's Inexplicable Treatment of Cynthia McKinney Ben Tripp Politus Interruptis: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Electorates? Mark Gaffney Slipping Towards Armageddon: Israel in Iraq Dave Lindorff Osama Wins! Election Postponed! Chris White Double Think: the Bedrock of Marine Indoctrination   July 10 / 12, 2004 Kathleen Christison The Problem with Neutrality Between Palestinians and Israel Janine Pommy Vega Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against War Sherry Wolf From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen A Transfer of Power, Sort Of Michael Donnelly How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004 Stanton / Madsen Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda? Richard Lichtman The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology Gila Svirsky Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall Kurt Nimmo Clinton's Life Toni Solo Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means Ron Jacobs The Black Panthers and the Rest Camelo Ruiz Marrero Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize Omar Barghouti Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance Poets' Basement Curtis and Albert   July 9, 2004 Dave Zirin Carlos Delgado on Deck: Blue Jays Slugger Stands Up Against War Justin Delacour Wishing Kerry Would Shut Up About Latin America Robert Fisk Iraq in Reverse: Martial Laws Fuel Insurgency Boris Kagarlitsky Two Congresses and a Funeral William S. Lind The October Surprises Sibel Edmonds Our Broken System: John Ashcroft's War on Truth Ron Jacobs Reading Tea Leaves: What Vietnam Tells Us About Iraq's Future Gary Leupp The Lie That Will Not Die: Cheney and the Iraq/al-Qaeda Link   July 8, 2004 Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Inexplicable John McCain Toufic Haddad Protesting Israel's Apartheid Wall: a Letter from the Hunger Strikers' Tent Dave Lindorff Liberation as Martial Law Joshua Frank The Fall: How Beltway Dems Sank Howard Dean Christopher Brauchli Bush & Cheney Play the Hitler Card James Petras The Truth About Jimmy Carter   July 7, 2004 John Chuckman Kerry's BBQ: a Deafening Silence of Meaning Virginia Tilley A Line in the Sand: Azmi Bishara's Hunger Strike Susan Martinez A Letter to Bill Cosby Mickey Z Elie Wiesel's Strange Parade Michael Donnelly Our Own Private Wilderness: Trusting the Land in the Inland Empire Sean Donahue Boston Social Forum: the Dems aren't the Only Show in Beantown Diane Christian Sovereignty and Freedom in Iraq   July 6, 2004 Lisa Viscidi Fleeing Guatemala: Central Americans Risk Lives to Reach El Norte Marc Norton The Felonious Five Ride Again: the Supreme Court and Enemy Combatants James Brooks Chemical Warfare on the West Bank? Ray McGovern Porter Goss as CIA Director? William Cook Legacy of Deceit: If Dante Knew of Bush and the Neo-Cons...   July 5, 2004 Forrest Hylton US Imperialism in Latin America: Sept. 11, July 4 and Systematic Torture Chris White A Former Marine Sgt. on the Meaning of Independence Day Joe Bageant Cranky Reflections on the 4th of July Robert Jensen Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore Misses About the Empire Kathy Kelly "Two Days an' a Wake-Up"   July 3 / 4, 2004 Elaine Cassel Bush's Police State and Independence Day Stan Goff ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive" Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti Snehal Shingavi "We Want Real Justice for Bhopal": Two Survivors Speak Out Bruce Anderson The Cheney-Leahy Metaphor and the Greens Sharon Smith Twilight of the Greens: the Chokehold of "Anybody But Bush" Josh Frank Ralph Nader's Revolt: an Interview with Greg Bates Robert Fisk Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing Joe Bageant Sons of a Laboring God: Leftnecks Unite! Brian Cloughley Fortress Bush and the One Law Doctrine Justin Delacour The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber: Venezuela's Media Tycoons William S. Lind Saudi Spillover Linda S. Heard A Joke Called "Justice" Greg Moses "It's Illegal, But It's Our Right": Korean Labor Won't Back Down Ron Jacobs "Ain't You Proud to be White on Independence Day?" Toni Solo Weary of Indigenous Resistances? Just Pretend They're Not There Dan Nagengast Chicken Manure as Cattle Food: Safe, But Do We Want to Eat It? Stew Albert Brando, a Personal Recollection Dave Zirin From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather: a Eulogy for Our Brando Patrick W. Gavin The Progressive Case for Dodgeball Steven Rosenthal / Junaid Ahmad The Problem is Bigger Than the Bushes: a Review of F911 Poets' Basement Kearney, Ford and Davies Website of the Day Global Peace Solution   July 2, 2004 Jeffrey St. Clair Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise of the Green Party Douglas Valentine Fahrenheit 911: Mocking the Moral Crisis of Capitalism Gary Leupp "Just Because I Could": On Obscenities and Opportunities Lee Ballinger Illegal People: Kerry Opposes Immigrant Rights Robert Fisk Saddam in the Dock: Confused? Hardly CounterPunch Wire "What Law Formed This Court?": a Transcript of Saddam's Arraignment Christopher Brauchli Bush's Drug Card Lottery: the Price Ain't Right Saul Landau Buzz Words and Venezuela   July 1, 2004 Katherine van Wormer Bush's Damaged Mind: the Madness in His Method Joe Bageant Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter? William James Martin The Dogma of Richard Perle Dave Lindorff Bush's Evacuation Moment Robert Fisk Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq Alan Maass Green Party in Reverse Website of the Day Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?     June 30, 2004 Kurt Nimmo Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush Tariq Ali Getting Away with Murder in Iraq Jennifer Van Bergen Bush and the Detainees Douglas Valentine Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen The Quiet American David Price Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass Roger Normand America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq Stan Cox Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's War on Art Henry David Thoreau On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming Ben Tripp Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof                       Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004 Isolated from the Human Community Israel Builds Another Wall By M. SHAHID ALAM Before I built a wall I'd like to know What I was walling in or walling out. Robert Frost On July 9, 2004, fourteen of the fifteen Justices on the International Court of Justice delivered an 'advisory opinion' on Israel's apartheid barrier that accurately reflects the world's growing moral outrage against Israel's determination to push the Palestinians to the wall and beyond. Appropriately--and yet, to our shame--the only contrary opinion was rendered by Justice Thomas Buergenthal, an American. The Justices declared that the wall being built by Israel, "the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around Jerusalem, and its associated régime, are contrary to international law." The Justices informed Israel that it is "under an obligation" to stop work on the wall, dismantle those portions of the wall that have been built, annul the legislative régime erected to support its construction, and render compensation for the damage it has already inflicted on the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Finally, the Justices called upon the United Nations--especially the General Assembly and the Security Council--to "consider what further action is required to bring to an end the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall and the associated régime, taking due account of the present Advisory Opinion." In these dark times, when American power has tied itself irrevocably--for the foreseeable future--to every Zionist aim against the Palestinians, be it ever so indefensible, the moral clarity of these judicial opinions will bring hope and encouragement to ordinary humans who do not always find it easy to sustain their struggle in the face of new oligarchies that practice their dark craft in the name of the men and women they trample upon methodically. Countering concerted pressure from the United States and its allies, the fourteen Justices, five from the European Union, have decided to apply the universal principles of justice to the actions of an Occupation that in its malicious intent, its devastating effects, its lengthening history, and its potential for fueling wars has no parallels in recent times. Yet, as predictably as it is tragic, the Zionists in Israel and their allies in the United States--both Christians and Jews--have responded to ICJ's 'advisory opinion' with hollow clichés that carry little conviction except with a segment of Americans, some of whom are avowed Christian Zionists, others white supremacists, but most have been coaxed into hating Palestinians by a media that is both mendacious and malicious in the ways in which it constructs the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Palestinians are terrorists and anti-Semites to boot; the Israelis, under threat and in peril, are their innocent victims. In editorials and speeches ringing across Israel and America, a thousand apologists are protesting that beleaguered Israel is building a 'security fence'--not a wall--whose only purpose is to safeguard innocent Israeli civilians against the primordial violence of Palestinians. In the columns of the New York Times, of July 13 2004, a former Israeli Prime Minister, explains that this "security barrier" is "temporary," it extends into "less than 12 percent of the West Bank," and it does not kill Palestinians, it merely harms their "quality of life" while saving Israeli lives. The unsophisticate that he is, the Israeli Prime Minister of course cannot appreciate that a 'reduced' quality of life easily feeds into higher mortality. There are smarter ways of killing than in death camps with poison gases. If the League of Nations, in the early stages of the Nazi campaign of ethnic cleansing, had had the moral courage to ask the Permanent Court of International Justice--the predecessor to the ICJ--to pass judgment on the legality of this campaign that, at this stage, included the herding of Jews into concentration camps, how might the Nazis have responded to an 'advisory opinion' that declared the herding of Jews to be in violation of international law and called the Nazis to immediately cease such actions? The Nazis might have chosen one of several arguments in their defense. Given the overt racism of the times, they could have appealed to their historical right--as communicated by the World Spirit--to exclusive ownership of the German Deutschland; the Jewish interlopers in Germany had to be removed to make room for the original and rightful owners. Had they taken a defensive line, they might argue that the 'relocation' of Jews was a temporary measure, undertaken in the face of clear intelligence of British plans to use Jews as a fifth column in their war against Germany. Alternatively, they might claim that this was a humanitarian move, gathering Jews into districts set apart for them and where they would be free to observe the halacha, which they had been unable to do in the past. They were only making amends for past lapses. And, of course, they might have claimed that the Justices were ganging up against them, singling them out, driven by a new wave of anti-Germanism fomented by the British and Americans. There is a terrible irony in the chorus of loud Zionist condemnations that have greeted the ICJ's ruling. To the eternal shame of the times, when the Jews were being herded into the concentration camps--where most of them would die--they had very little help from the Allied powers, the self-designated keepers of world conscience. The United States closed its doors to Jewish immigration. Certainly, there were no rulings from the Permanent Court on the barbarity of German plans of genocide. Bitterly, and justifiably, the Jews have accused the world of letting them die in the Nazi terror. No Courts, no governments offered effective support, material or moral. No one came to the support of the Palestinians either, as the British awarded their country to the Zionists, as the British after occupying Palestine allowed European Jews to settle the country, form militias, and prepare to drive out the Palestinians. No Western publics raised a voice when 800,000 Palestinians were terrorized into fleeing their homes in 1948 and stripped of their right to return. No Western publics supported the Palestinians when they began to resist the Israeli occupation of West Bank and Gaza. Instead, taking the cue from Israel, the Western powers branded the Palestinians as terrorists, and refused to recognize their existence as a people. The moral indignation of the Western publics has only been aroused in the past decade, starting with the First Intifada, which revealed the brutal face of the Israeli Occupation, crushing, pulverizing, expropriating a mostly unarmed people. Yet the Zionists today relentlessly accuse these Western publics of anti-Semitism, of singling them out because they are Jews. For too long, the Zionists have acted with impunity against the Palestinians, because they have succeeded in using the Holocaust to shield themselves against the censure of Western publics. That makes the Occupation a perfect crime, without any perpetrators. Better yet: the perpetrators became the primary victims of those they victimize. However, lately, world conscience has been stirring, waking up to the insufferable conditions imposed upon Palestinians by the Israeli Occupation. World conscience is affirming itself in a hundred ways: in the Internationals who risk death to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes; in the willingness of the Belgian Court to try Ariel Sharon for war crimes; in the reminders by South Africans that this Occupation is worse than the Apartheid they had endured; in the academics who initiated a movement to boycott Israeli academics; in the students protesting investments in the Israeli economy; in the world-wide marches, protests and activism against the Israeli Occupation. And now the International Court of Justice has spoken, loudly and clearly, against Israel's apartheid wall. Indeed, increasing numbers of Israelis are speaking out--even members of their armed forces, those who have seen the ugliness of the Occupation at first hand because they were its direct enforcers. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers have refused to 'serve' in the West Bank and Gaza, risking jail sentences. Other Jewish voices are being raised, warning that Israel is losing its soul, that the Occupation is brutalizing young Israeli men and women, who then brutalize their families, their spouses, their children. Increasingly, Israeli soldiers are taking their own lives. This is not a distant colonial Occupation, thousands of miles away from the European home base, that could be held down by a handful of soldiers and hired natives. Every Israeli--indeed a large segment of world Jewry--participates in this Occupation. Is there a danger that the world may to begin to look upon Israel as the moral equivalent in our own times of a Nazi Germany? This 'moral equivalence in our times' does not require that Israel duplicate all the crimes of Nazi Germany. Instead, the world will be asking if, relative to the morality and the constraints of our times, Israel has gone as far as Nazi Germany did in more barbarous times, when the extermination of 'inferior races' was regarded as the right of White Europeans. It would appear that as Israel builds the apartheid barrier whose intent is to wall the Palestinians in, sealing them inside a few miserable Bantustans, it is simultaneously building another wall, invisible but no less solid in construction, that is walling Israel out, disconnecting it from the human community, its laws, its hopes and its sympathies. Increasingly, in the years ahead, the world will be asking this question unless it can see an end to the Israeli Occupation in sight. M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. Visit his website at http:msalam.net. He may be reached at m.alam@neu.edu. Weekend Edition Features for July 10 / 12, 2004 Kathleen Christison The Problem with Neutrality Between Palestinians and Israel Janine Pommy Vega Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against War Sherry Wolf From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen A Transfer of Power, Sort Of Michael Donnelly How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004 Stanton / Madsen Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda? Richard Lichtman The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology Gila Svirsky Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall Kurt Nimmo Clinton's Life Toni Solo Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means Ron Jacobs The Black Panthers and the Rest Camelo Ruiz Marrero Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize Omar Barghouti Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance Poets' Basement Curtis and Albert WWW http://www.counterpunch.org   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /