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Today's Stories September 25, 2007 Nicole Colson On the March Against Racism September 24, 2007 George Ciccariello-Maher Racist Violence from Jena to Oakland Saree Makdisi The War on Gaza's Children David Keen Action-as-Propaganda: Learning About the Iraq War from Hannah Arendt Sherwood Ross Just How Powerful is the Israel Lobby? Only Cheney Knows for Sure Ron Jacobs Greenspan's Open Secret Donna Saggia The Cult of the Military and the Decline of Democratic Values Mike Ferner Free Speech Takes a Capitol Beating Malini Johar Schueller Norman Hsu is a Model Minority Monique Dols and Dylan Stillwood Ahmadinejad and Columbia Website of the Day The Promotion September 22 / 23, 2007 Alexander Cockburn On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" Jennifer Loewenstein Beneath the Hideous Veneer of Security Linn Washington, Jr. The Injustice in Jena: Prosecutorial Misconduct More Dangerous Than Racism Jeffrey St. Clair Going Down in Dinosaur: Oil, Dams and Whitewater (Part One) Alan Farago Genuflecting to China Brian Cloughley Of Hate, Hubris and Atrocities Robert Fantina The Deadly Pattern of US Imperialism Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Land Tenure and Resistance in New Mexico Jason Hribal Fear of an Animal Planet David Rosen Slugger Sex: Athletes, Violence and Male Sexuality Mike Whitney The Era of Global Financial Instability John V. Walsh Who Will Lead a Filibuster of the Iraq War Spending Bill? Dave Lindorff Why Aren't We Banning Blackwater Here? David Michael Green Hiding Behind a Camouflage Skirt Fred Gardner Claudia Jensen (Look Back in Anger) Cassandra Jones Support Our Mercenaries Roger van Zwanenberg Pluto Press Under Attack by Israel Lobby Poets' Basement Buknatski, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend "For the Bible Tells Me So"   September 21, 2007 Karim Makdisi Letter from Lebanon M. Shahid Alam A History of Violence Alan Farago Who Will Buy My House? Joshua Frank The Demise of the Congressional Black Caucus Dave Zirin Notre Dame and the Economy of Sports Kenneth Couesbouc A Short History of Lending and Borrowing Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein Mass Health Care Failure Ben Terrall The Streets of San Francisco: Where Impeachment is Taken Seriously--By Everyone But Pelosi Steve Fournier Ex-Dems, Sign Up Here Frederico Fuentes, et al Voices in Defense of Bolivia Website of the Day Sabra and Shatila, Remembered   September 20, 2007 Kathleen Christison Whatever Happened to Palestine? Zoltan Grossman An Endless Occupation? Paul Craig Roberts As the Empire Slips: Greenspan and the Economy of Greed Stan Cox and Wes Jackson Carbon-Free and Still Wrecking the Planet Russell Mokhiber AARP to Kucinich: Drop Dead Charles Modiano Jim Crow's Children: the Jena 6, Shaquanda Cotton and Blog Power Raymond J. Lawrence Bush's Worrisome Use of Religion Brendan Cooney Body-Snatched Nation Website of the Day Mind Control for Breakfast   September 19, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By? Paul Krassner The Power of Laughter Sgt. Martin Smith The New Private Warriors: Blackwater in Iraq Seth Sandronsky Living in a Dilapidated Market: To Rent or Own? Claud Cockburn Looking back at the Great Crash Victoria Buch Israel's Agenda for Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer Robert Weissman Oil Warriors: From Greenspan to Kissinger Mike Ferner Can We Talk? Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger's $9 Billion Boondoggle for Big Water Website of the Day Housing Cost Calculator   September 18, 2007 Mike Whitney U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel Alan Farago Interviewing Alan Greenspan: How 60 Minutes Blew It John Ross America's Great Wall: Where Will the Workers Go When They Finish It? Ron Jacobs Nooses Hung From Jena, La. to College Park, Md. Alex Doherty Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement": Who's Responsible? September 17, 2007 Marjorie Cohn Erwin Chemerinsky and the Post-9/11 Attack on Academic Freedom Paul Craig Roberts Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be Ricardo Alarcón The Return of C. Wright Mills Amid the Dawn of a New Era Marc Levy Fake Vets Chasing Fame Eva Liddell In 1969 We Already Knew What 2007 Would Look Like Website of the Day Propaganda: Your Job in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra, and written by Theodor Geisel Sept. 15-16, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The General Came to Washington Vicente Navarro How the U.S. Schemed Against Spain's Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy Mike Whitney Plummeting Dollar, Credit Crunch Herman Mindshaftgap Has There Ever Been a Surge? If so, Has it a Future? Ellen Cantarow Girls! Music! Palestine! Jordan Flaherty K-Ville: Fox's New Paean to the N.O.P.D. Zachary Hurwitz Julio Cusurichi on Amazonian Development September 14, 2007 Debbie Nathan New York Times reporter was a member of an illegal underage porn site, claims he was only "posing as online predator" Franklin Lamb Sabra-Shatilla, 25 Years Later Patrick Cockburn Greet Bush and Die: The Killing of Abu Risha Farzana Versey The World's Richest Muslim Tycoon Alan Farago This is Florida, Epicenter of the Housing Bust and of Public Corruption Hank Edson Bill's New Book is Giving Me a Headache September 13, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Petraeus Confided Presidential Ambitions to Iraqi Official Scott Vest, former Air Force Captain at Minot The Barksdale Nukes Andy Worthington Guantánamo: "Ghost" Prisoners Speak At Last Michael Baney Mr. Fixit of Quake-Stricken Peru Has Death Squad Past Dr. Susan Block Is U.S. Run by Secret Homintern? September 12, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts American Economy: RIP Stan Goff The Petraeus Report William Blum When Soldiers Mutiny...Only Those Fighting the War Can End It. Manuel Garcia Forgetting 9/11 Debbie Nathan Why One Sex Survey Didn't Make the Big Time September 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn The Fakery of General Petraeus Iain Boal Specters of Malthus: Scarcity, Poverty, Apocalypse Michael Dickinson Osama on 9/11 Guerry Hoddersen Free Speech is Not Given, but Taken Bill Hatch Irish Politics in Old Time California Gary Leupp The Legacy of Luciano Pavarotti Website of the Day Elisa Salasin's "My September 11th" September 10, 2007 Uri Avnery A Big Victory Against the Wall Patrick Cockburn Petraeus's Closet Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen Screwing Up In Iraq David Michael Green Why Fred Thompson is Uniquely Qualified to be the GOP's Nominee Pius Adesanmi A Solidarity Letter to a Victim of Michael Vick Betty Schneider How to Deal With Sex Offenders   September 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Will the US Really Bomb Iran? Saul Landau The Irrational Drama of a Declining Empire Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Hurricane Katrina and Bush's Wars Ray McGovern Petraeus, the Westmoreland of Iraq Matthew Abraham Finkelstein's Legacy at DePaul Alan Farago The Governor and the Growth Machine Christopher Brauchli Grand Old Party Animals Rannie Amiri Battle of the Camps Fred Gardner Will Snoops Get Stopped? James L. Secor B-52 Flexing Nuclear Muscles: H-Bombs Over Barksdale Missy Comley Beattie Choices: Shall We Stay or Shall We Go Now? Ben Tripp Still in the Clover Francis Boyle The University of Illinois' Little Red Sambo Show Joe Allen and Paul D'Amato Jason Bourne vs. James Bond Website of the Weekend Drilling Wyoming: the View from Above September 7, 2007 Robert Fantina Those Iraq Reports: Bush vs. Reality John Ross Coca-Cola's Raid on a Sacred Mountain James Brooks The Occupation Within Russell Mokhiber Robert Reich and the Elimination of Corporate Criminal Liability Joshua Frank The Green Implosion Continues: Cyberlynching John Murphy John Walsh On the Green Party Mark Brenner New York Taxi Workers Strike Over Tracking Devices Mike Ferner "I Will Salute No More Forever" Website of the Day Help Save Osny Zachary's Life   September 6, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison Bush, Iran and Israel's Hidden Hand Allan J. Lichtman When General Petraeus Speaks, Don't Listen ... Norman Solomon The Secret Addiction of Thomas Friedman Yifat Susskind Hurricane Felix's First Responders: Courage and Tragedy on the Miskito Coast Catherine Fenton Why I Am Going to the Protest Laura Santina Can the War Machine be Contained? Farzana Versey Fission Kashmir Yves Engler Haiti: Where a Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much for the Lords of Industry to Pay Kelly Overton Bang Bang; Shoot Shoot: Is Hunting Racist? Michael Simmons One Jew's Views: The Strange Genius of Drew Friedman and Kominsky Crumb Website of the Day Dams and Genocide in Guatemala     September 5, 2007 Stan Goff The End Begins Michael Dickinson Working for Mother Teresa: Memoirs of a Rebellious Volunteer Matthew Abraham Standing Firm with Norman Finkelstein and DePaul's Heroic Students: a Defining Moment Patrick Cockburn The Basra Debacle Dave Lindorff Beware the Wounded Beast Paul Craig Roberts Who Are the Fanatics? Clifton Ross Ecuador and the Struggle for Latin American Unity Elizabeth Schulte Katrina's Forgotten Refugees Joseph Grosso Labor Day in New York City Ben Terrall Where's Nancy? On Trying to Protest Pelosi in San Francisco Website of the Day A Guide to Narco Dollars   September 4, 2007 Jean Bricmont Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran Patrick Cockburn Cut and Run in Iraq Ron Jacobs The Haditha Massacre: Spinning a War Crime Tom Kerr Buried Alive on San Quentin's Death Row Gary Leupp The Case of Jose Maria Sison Sonja Karkar The Weeping Olive Trees of Palestine Heather Gray The Best and Worst of America: 9/11, Joseph Lowery and the Lethal Silence of Billy Graham Fidel Castro The Super-Revolutionaries Jackie Corr Home Depot Comes to Butte--Begging Bowl in Hand Sunsara Taylor Katrina and the Progress of the System Website of the Day Colombia Journal   September 3, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Brits Flee from Basra Eamon McCann Qana, Derry: The Dead Lie in Familiar Shapes Joshua Frank The End of the Green Party? Chris Floyd Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph Marjorie Cohn A Look at Bush's Iran War Plans Walter Brasch The News Drones: How Fake Photos Helped Lead the US to War in Iraq Matt Reichel Redefining the American Dream Website of the Day Don't Get Fooled Again   September 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Entrapment Snares Larry Craig Andy Worthington Britain's Guantánamo Saul Landau The Tragic Ordeal of the Cuban Five David Keen An Occident Waiting to Happen: Intellectuals and the War on Terror Patrick Cockburn The Collapse of Iraq's Health Care Services Diana Johnstone Back in Uncle Sam's Pocket George Longstreth, MD & Karen Longstreth, RN The Sorrows of Occupation: Life in the West Bank Linda M. Woolf A Sad Day for Psychologists--a Sadder Day for Human Rights Ralph Nader Wrapping the World with Advertising Fred Gardner The Trial of Mollie Fry, MD Ben Tripp Enquiry in America Today David Michael Green American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs from the Gut Missy Comley Beattie Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: What the GOP Hasn't Learned About Tolerance Michael Dickinson Who's Cheating: Remembering Princess Diana Paul Krassner Assholes of the Week: From Larry Craig to Wesley Clark Ron Jacobs A Sports Nation of Millions Poets' Basement Buknatski, Davies and Mickey Z         Subscribe Online

September 25, 2007 The Yom Kippur War Today Foam on the Water By URI AVNERY Today is Yom Kippur, and almost automatically my thoughts, like those of everybody else who was around at the time, go back 34 years, to that Yom Kippur. I was sitting at home, deep in conversation with a friend, when the sirens suddenly started to wail. The sound of sirens is always frightening, but sirens on Yom Kippur are something from another world. After all, this is a day of total silence, the day when not a single car moves on the streets of Israel. Outside, a flurry of unusual activity. Military vehicles speeding by, people in uniform rushing out with kitbags on their shoulders, the roar of airplanes overhead. We gathered round the radio, which is normally silent on Yom Kippur. It announced that a war had started. * * * I WAS not called up, but on the following days I saw the war from several different angles. I was at the time a Member of the Knesset and the editor-in-Chief of the Haolam Hazeh news magazine, but the Knesset was on vacation (it all happened in the middle of an election campaign) and the editorial staff of the magazine was almost incapacitated, since most of its members had been called up. Rami Halperin, a young photographer who had just been released from army service and started to work for the magazine, did not wait to be called up but rushed to join his former unit, in time for the battle for the "Chinese Farm", where he was killed. A well-known German TV director came to the country and asked for advice about filming the war. While we talked, the idea came to him of making a film about me covering the war. That way I saw all the fronts. We were searching for Ariel Sharon in the South and followed him to the Suez Canal. A few kilometers from the canal we came under heavy Egyptian shelling. We were stuck in a huge traffic jam - a whole division with its troop carriers, cannon, tanks, ambulances and whatever else was on the move towards the canal. On the way we entered a mobile field hospital, where a military doctor, Ephraim Sneh - now a prominent Member of the Knesset - was operating. Next we hurried to the Northern Front. We passed large numbers of burned-out tanks, theirs and ours, and reached a village about a dozen kilometers from Damascus. Somehow I remember a conversation with a small boy about cats. In between we inspected a refugee camp near Nablus and the Old City of Jerusalem. From every coffee shop blared the voice of the Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, explaining his war aims. The members of the German team were flabbergasted. They remembered stories from World War II and found it incredible that the occupied population was allowed to listen freely to the enemy radio * * * BUT THE event that is engraved in my memory - and in the memory of most Israelis who lived through that time - did not happen on the front. We were sitting in a neighbor's apartment, when an image appeared on the TV screen: dozens of Israeli soldiers crouching on the ground, hands over bowed heads, with terrifying Syrian soldiers towering over them. Never before had we seen Israeli soldiers like this: dirty, unshaven, obviously frightened, miserable as only prisoners of war can be. There was silence in the room. At that moment the myth of the Israeli superman, of the invincible Israeli soldier, which had dominated our lives for a generation, died. This myth was the ultimate victim of the Yom Kippur War. True, the Israeli army proved itself. In three weeks of war it snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. At the beginning of the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was muttering about the "destruction of the Third Temple" (meaning the State of Israel), at the end, the army was threatening both Cairo and Damascus. But the legend of the invincible Israeli army was shattered. The picture of the helpless and humiliated Israeli prisoners refuses to be eradicated from memory. Right after the war, the Battle of the Generals broke out. Their quarrels destroyed the prestige of the military leaders, who until then had been the idols of the public. It has never fully recovered. (But, contrary to the expectations of many, the stranglehold of the army on Israeli policy was not diminished.) This psychological rupture was followed by a political break. The generation of Golda Meir left the stage, the generation of Yitzhak Rabin took its place. Only three and a half years later, the unbelievable happened: Menachem Begin, the eternal opposition leader, assumed power. * * * BEGIN'S MAIN achievement, the peace with Egypt, was a direct result of the Yom Kippur War, which the Arabs call the Ramadan War. The crossing of the canal and the breaking of the Bar-Lev Line restored Egyptian pride, and that made peace possible. I was one of the first five Israelis to reach Cairo after Sadat's visit to Jerusalem, and I vividly remember the hundreds of posters hanging over the streets: "Sadat - Hero of War, Hero of Peace!" In Israel, too, many remember Begin as a hero of peace. After all, he was the first Israeli statesman to make peace with an Arab country - and not just any Arab country, but the most central and important one. In spite of all that has happened in the meantime, this peace has held. Some people are berating Bashar al-Assad and King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia for not following Sadat's example. Why don't they dare to come to Jerusalem? This line of reasoning is based on a misreading of the facts. Sadat did not just decide to come. It did not happen the way he described it so many times (in a conversation with me, too): that he was coming back from a visit to Europe and, while flying over Mount Ararat, was suddenly inspired to do something unparalleled in history: to visit the enemy's capital while still in a state of war The truth is that before the visit, emissaries of Sadat and Begin had held secret meetings in Morocco. Only after Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan had promised, on Begin's behalf, to give back all the occupied Egyptian territories, did Sadat make his decision. Where is the Israeli leader today who is ready to promise Assad the return of all the Golan, to promise Mahmoud Abbas a withdrawal to the Green Line? * * * HOW DID Begin decide to give Egypt "parts of our fatherland"? Very simple: for him, they were not "parts of our fatherland". Begin had before his eyes a clear map of the Land of Israel. He had inherited it from his master and teacher, Zeev Jabotinsky: the map of the country at the beginning of the British Mandate, on both banks of the Jordan. In the course of history, the borders of this country have changed hundreds of times. There were the borders of the Divine Promise, from the Nile to the Euphrates. There were the borders of the "Kingdom of David" (which never existed), reaching to Hamat in northern Syria. There were the borders of the tiny enclave around Jerusalem at the time of Ezra and Nehemia. There were the borders of Roman Palaestina, which changed from time to time. There were the borders of "Jund (military zone) Filastin" of the Muslim conquerors. And many more. Like all the preceding borders, those of the British Mandate were fixed by accident. In the South, they were agreed upon before World War I between the British (who ruled Egypt) and the Turks (who ruled Palestine). In the North, they were agreed upon - after that war - between the French colonial government in Syria and the British colonial government in Palestine. In Transjordan, a long sleeve was stretched to Iraq, in order to allow for the free flow of oil from Mosul (then also under British control) to Haifa on the Mediterranean. It was this accidental map that was sanctified by Jabotinsky, who wrote the famous song: "The Jordan has two banks / this one belongs to us, and the other one too." It was part of the emblem of the Irgun underground and appeared on the masthead of the newspaper of Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party, the forerunner of today's Likud. Begin's conclusion: the Sinai Peninsula does not belong to the Land of Israel and so can be given up without moral scruples. The purpose was to get Egypt out of the war, which for Begin had only one aim: possession of the whole of the Land of Israel, which others call Palestine. Begin would have had no problem with giving up the Golan, which, according to this map, also does not belong to the country. But he was captivated by Ariel Sharon, who seduced him to invade Lebanon in order to annihilate the PLO, hiding from him his second objective: to knock out Syria. (As is well known, both objectives failed.) In the meantime, a new generation has grown up, one that does not know Jabotinsky and his map. In the consciousness of the Israeli Right, a new map has taken shape: the East Bank of the Jordan has been taken out, the Golan has been put in. But in its center there lies, as always, the West Bank. * * * BEFORE THE Six-Day War, the British historian of the Crusades, Steven Runciman, told me that we live in a paradox: "Israel was founded in the land that once belonged to the Philistines, while the Palestinians, who got their name from the Philistines, live in the land that belonged to the ancient Kingdom of Israel." The borders between the State of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were laid down by the war of 1948. Since then, The State of Israel has been working hard to eliminate this paradox. Everything significant that is happening nowadays is a part of the Israeli effort to take over the West Bank and to turn it into a part of the State of Israel. All else is but foam on the water. The pathetic Condoleezza Rice keeps coming and going. Ehud Olmert is formulating a document without content in order to create the illusion of progress towards the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. Israeli airplanes bombard a Syrian area in order to eliminate a threat of "weapons of mass destruction". Israel prepares to bomb or not to bomb nuclear installations in Iran. President Bush is calling for an "international meeting" at an unknown date, with unknown participants for an unknown purpose. All this is imagined reality. The real reality is unfolding on the ground, every day, every hour: nightly incursions in West Bank towns, frantic building in the settlements, enlargement of the "Israelis only" road network, further additions to the 600 or so existing roadblocks, worsening of the living conditions in the Palestinian ghettos in the West Bank and turning life in the Gaza Strip into hell. This is the real war: the war for "the whole of the Land of Israel" - a war that has disappeared from public discourse, but that is being waged energetically, far from the eyes of Israelis living only 20 minutes drive from there. The Palestinians are fighting with their meager means but with dogged obduracy. If a historic compromise between the peoples is not achieved, this war will go on for generations. A boy born today will join the war on his 18th birthday, like the boys born 18 years ago, and his father, like those before him, will bury him. The Yom Kippur War was only a small episode in this campaign. It was fought in the North and the South, against the Syrians and the Egyptians. The Palestinians were not involved. But no one doubted for a moment that it was a part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is o a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Your Ad Here

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