|
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
August
5, 2002
Israeli Attack
"Terribly Wrong"
US Repsonse:
Status Quo
World: Two-State Peace Plan
by Mike Leon
Madison, Wisconsin. Becky is a bright, peaceful, and clear-minded
woman living outside Madison.
She works at a Fortune 500 company based
in Wisconsin. She is in fact a wonderful human being--warm,
funny, remarkably giving and thoughtful, the type of person
you would like to look after your children for a weekend.
Socially liberal and humanistic, this
woman goes out of her way at work to make everyone around her
feel comfortable, not a tribalist bone in her body. I work next
to her. Knowing of my interest in politics, she began a conversation
last week after the Hamas terrorist bombing at Hebrew University
in Jerusalem killed 12 people, including, significantly, five
Americans.
"You know Mike, what they should
do is kill 10 terrorists for each life (that the terrorists)
take."
Her remark starkly contrasted with the
peaceful, clear-minded woman I talk to at work every day.
I averred that the deterrent effect of
such action would probably be negligible and "well, more
innocent people would probably be killed (a result that I know
she does not support)." Chatting casually, we both recognized
that our setting precluded diving much further into the topic
(begun anyway as the social equivalent of a "hello").
Becky's casual remark -- killing 10 of
theirs' for every one of ours' -- well describes the official
policy outcome of Israeli occupation and its bellicose crusade
for Israeli lebensraum, that raised-to-kill, sick child of American
foreign policy that the Promised Land has become for the few
million human beings trying to live next door. Becky's fleeting
acceptance of killing innocents is what American foreign policy
has propagated.
Most Americans are silent as the Israeli
Defense Forces inflict the systematic dismantlement of Palestinian
civilization with American weaponry. We are silent as Sharon
purposefully provokes the expected response of further terrorism
by Hamas and the like.
A moral equivalency? A New York Times
editorial (August 4, 2002, "Mideast Terror Brought Home")
engages that equation side-on: "The point here is not that
the deaths of innocents caused by Israel's attack and Hamas's
blatant act of terror are morally equivalent. The point is that
they are both terribly wrong." Can you believe that?
Not addressed by the Times editorial
of course is that we are in a ready position to halt Israel's
"terribly wrong" actions, and the bringing-it-all-back-home
response terrorism. But the appellation of "terribly wrong"
likely constitutes the strongest condemnation of Israeli terrorism
that the Times can muster.
In the Mideastern debate there is an
ethic (widely observed and Israeli apologist Elie Wiesel-endorsed)
precluding comparisons of Israeli foreign policy to Nazi foreign
policy. This is an ethic rooted in the contemporary denial
of Israeli terrorism, a reasonable sensitivity to survivors,
and an altogether different grotesque misuse of the Holocaust.
I certainly do not entirely subscribe to it.
But as an American I will say that I
reject Israeli terrorism and to Ariel Sharon, I say: You sir,
belong in the company of the very terrorists who are killing
and maiming Israeli innocents. You know your policy will result
in further killing of innocents on all sides of this conflict.
Therefore, you no longer have a place among the civilized people
of the world and you should remove yourself. You have become
a murdering pig of the type that should haunt humanity through
the future of civilization.
With Bush at the helm, the American non
response can be summed up in the appearance of Condoleezza Rice,
National Security Adviser, on
NBC's Meet the Press on June 30, 2002 . Calling for the
removal of Arafat (and naturally not Sharon) and disingenuously
attempting to dress up Bush's refusal to end Israeli aggression
and actively work for peace in the region, Rice repeated the
word "change" a dozen times, spoke of an "emergence"
and a "new dynamic," and used a load of other action
words to describe Bush's insistence to do nothing as a commitment
that "...in fact, we don't intend to stand and do nothing."
(Remarkably, Rice had called for free media access for all political
persuasions in the next Palestinian election--a deviation from
administration distaste for domestic campaign public financing.)
As millions of Americans, the vast majority
of the world, and I strongly suspect my colleague Becky (even
in reacting to Americans being killed) would agree, the time
remains urgent for a solution along the lines of United Nation
Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), a two-state solution
for peace and justice that the major supplier of arms in the
region can seed and bequeath to future generations in the face
of almost unanimous world-wide endorsement.
America needs only to see the bright,
clear-minded vision within it that the rest of the world has
recognized for over three decades.
Back at the Fortune 500 company, Becky
did mention later that, "yep, somebody has do something."
Mike Leon
is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His work has appeared
nationally in In These Times, The Progressive and CounterPunch.
He can be reached at maleon@terracom.net
Today's
Features
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|