Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
February 21,
2005
Michael Neumann
Startegies
in Palestine: a Shrinking Pie in the Sky
February 19
/ 20, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Back
to Salem: Paul Shanley and the Return of "Recovered Memory"
Kathleen Christison
Struggling
for Justice in Palestine
Ted Honderich
On Being Persona Non Grata
Gary Leupp
Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House & Welcome to
Commit Suicide
Don Santina
Reparations for the Blues
Jennifer Roesch
John Negroponte: Dirty Warrior
Scott Richard
Lyons
Ward
Churchill and the Identity Police
Chris Clarke
Ward Churchill and Liberal Outrage
George Beres
Censorship in the Land of Wayne Morse: Gagging W. Churchill in
Oregon
Harry Browne
The Belfast Heist: the Plot Unravels
Manuel García,
Jr.
Who Killed Rafik Hariri?
Mark Scaramella
Lessons from the Hidden Afghan War
Michael Donnelly
Whatever Happened to John Edwards?
John Pilger
First, They Attack the Past
Norman Madarasz
Death Wish for Reform in Brazil?
Surendra Devkota
The Monarchy in Nepal
Deborah Rich
How Anti-GMO Ballot Measures May Miss the Mark
Fred Gardner
When Dr. Tod Met Merle Haggard
CounterPunch
News Service
About King Mswati: Political Developments in Swaziland
Richard Oxman
CounterPunching Arthur Miller
Poets' Basement
Albert, Giebel, Tripp, Engel and Orkin
February 18,
2005
Ben Moxham
In
East Timor, the Nightmare Continues
Dave Lindorff
The
Scum Also Rises: the Bloody Career of John Negroponte
Larry Birns
Negroponte: a Resume of Death Squads, Deceptions and Bribery
Gregory Elich
N, Korea's Phantom Nukes and the US's Subversion of Diplomacy
Samuel Logan / John Meyers
The Future of Colombia's Paramilitary Death Squads
Nicole Colson
Shock and Awe on Civil Liberties: From Lynne Stewart to Ward
Churchill
Suzan Mazur
Whose National Security Are We Talking About?
Mickey Z.
"One
Man Has Stopped Killing"
February 17,
2005
Joshua Frank
Hogtying
of the Deaniacs
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
Willing Sychophants: the Conservative Media
Robert Fisk
Under
the Shadow of Death in Lebanon
Christopher
Brauchli
Where
Time Stands Still: Kinsey and Darwin in Cobb County, GA
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military
Recruitment TV: Why Send Them to College, When Your Kid Can be
Cannon Fodder?
Alison Weir
Russia, Israel and Media Omissions
Ahrar Ahmad
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Is There an Islamic Problem?"
Saul Landau
An
Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon: "The US Tramples
the Laws It Wrote"
Website of the Day
Petition to Support Ward Churchill
February 16,
2005
Robert Fisk
Lebanon:
a Battlefield for the Wars of Others
Kevin Zeese
Creating a Real Ownership Society: Share the Wealth; Protect
Retirement
Gary Leupp
Meanwhile, in Nepal...
Ron Jacobs
Why the Iranian Opposition Should Not Trust the Bush Administration
Jessica Leight
Oil-Flush Chavez Begins to Strut His Stuff
Greg Moses
Houston, You've Got a Problem: Documenting Voting Irregularities
in Texas
Mark Engler
The Last Porto Alegre
Jack McCarthy
Where's the Outrage About Pat? Buchanan Does a Churchill
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel
Website of the Day
The
World is Melting: a Photo Survey by Gary Braasch
February 15,
2005
CounterPunch
News Service
Dean
a "Safe" Moderate, Says NYT Citing CounterPunch
Robert Fisk
The
Killing of Mr. Lebanon
Uri Avnery
"Sharm-al-Sheikh,
We Have Come Back Again"
Stan Cox
Fighting Big Pharma in Little Digwal
Mickey Z.
Radio
Active North of the Border: an Interview with Chris Cook
Dave Zirin
Bashing Bush: Jose Canseco Comes Clean
Nadia Martinez
Ending
World Poverty? Opening at the World Bank, Apply Now
Lila Rajiva
"Little Eichmanns" and the 'Harijan': the Danger of
Magical Thinking in Politics
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
American Job Sell Out
February 14,
2005
Robert Jensen
Ward
Churchill: Right to Speak Out; Right About 9/11
Brian Cloughley
Kuwait's Freedom, Bush-style
Patrick Cockburn
Outcome
of the Iraqi Elections: Shortages, Corruption, Guerrilla War
Gary Leupp
Post-election Iraq: What Next?
Michael Donnelly
Sacred Nature: Just Another Commodity?
Dave Lindorff
When Bush Came to My Neighborhood
Elaine Cassel
The
Lynne Stewart Verdict
February 12
/ 13, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill's Genes
Saul Landau
Alarcon
Speaks: an Interview with the Vice President of Cuba
Paul Craig
Roberts
Nothing
to Fear But Bush Himself
Patrick Cockburn
Two Years After the Fall of Saddam, the Resistance Controls All
Major Roads into Baghdad
John Feffer
Bush
v. N. Korea: Round Two
Mickey Z.
Right to Remain Silent; Duty to Speak
Kurt Nimmo
Viva la Cucaracha!
Fred Gardner
Waiting for Raich
Dave Zirin
Fighting the New Republic(ans)
John Chuckman
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
A Leftist on the Bush Payroll
Carol Norris
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Dwarf?"
Robert Fisk
No Middle East Peace Without Justice
Frank / Chowkwanyun
Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror: the Case of Sherman Austin
Mike Whitney
Condi's Euro Tour
Deborah Frisch
A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Reading Khomeini in Colorado
Christine TenBarge
What's So Special About Ward?
Ron Jacobs
Curtis Mayfield's Train to Jordan
Dr. Susan Block
Chemistry of Love: a Valentine's Greeting
Poets' Basement
Louise, Smith-Ferri, Ford and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Free Sherman
February 11,
20055
Manuel Garcia,
Jr
The
Eight Percent War
Kurt Nimmo
Ann
Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need
Him?
Dave Lindorff
Guckert
or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In
Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott
Abrams
Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz
Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Lynne
Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All
February 10,
2005
Dave Lindorff
What
Academic Freedom?
Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed
Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?
Suzan Mazur
More
on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha
Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition
Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little
Hope"
Greg Moses
Taking
Jesus Back from the Hijackers
Website of
the Day
The Missionary Positions
February 9,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Duck
and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers
Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say
John Ross
Hecho
en Mexico: the Iraqi Election
Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon
Conn Hallinan
The
Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely
Forbidden"
Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions
Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians
Website of
the Day
Support Antiwar.com
February 8,
2005
Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd
Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral
Pact, Not a Party"
Brian Cloughley
Out
of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"
Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"
Harry Browne
"Don't
Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland
Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President
and Ward Churchill
Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the
Same Beast
Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper
David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq
February 7,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
War on Jobs
Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher
Ed
Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill
Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill
Patrick Cockburn
The
Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq
Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism
Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried
Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI
Tariq Ali
Imperial
Delusions
February 5
/ 6, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill and the Mad Dogs
Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day
Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill
P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust
Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America
Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story
Pamela Olson
West Bank Story
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court
Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents
Robert Fisk
History by Laptop
David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome
Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada
Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love
Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life
Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside
Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy
Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the
Game
Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert
Website of
the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File
February 4,
2005
Brian Cloughley
The
Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior
of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"
Bill Christison
Election
Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005
Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?
Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft
Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal
Ron Jacobs
The
Downward Spiral in Iraq
February 3,
2005
Ward Churchill
On
the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications
and Gross Distortions
Sharon Smith
Resisting
Soldiers Need Our Support
Mickey Z.
Leslie
Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?
Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union
Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan
Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq
Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence
Dave Lindorff
The
Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies
February 2,
2005
David Domke
/ Kevin Coe
Bush's
Brand of Christianity
Noam Chomsky
Iraq
After the Elections
M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's
Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me
in Its Crosshairs
Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen
Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean
Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT
Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn
Website of the Day
War is a Racket
February 1,
2005
Joshua L. Dratel
The
Torture Memos
Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi
Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
Uri Avnery
The Stalemate
Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal
Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel
Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades
Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified
Voters
Paul Craig
Roberts
American
Police State
Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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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
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True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
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February 21, 2005
A Shrinking Pie in the Sky
Strategies
in Palestine
By
MICHAEL NEUMANN
In the next while a certain pattern
of events is likely to repeat itself in Palestine.
Various peace moves and negotiations
will continue.
Israel will make various good-will
gestures. Mahmood Abbas will make various gratifying responses,
and come into conflict with various people called militants or
extremists. Last but far from least, there will be Palestinian
attacks on Israelis--soldiers, settlers, perhaps civilians within
Israel.
On the far right, reaction
to these last events will breathe fiery indignation and abuse.
A bit rightwards, warm-hearted racists and the West's pet Muslims
will speak with compassionate agony about the twisted minds of
'Arabs'. Right of that, near the center and over to the left
a bit, we will hear a lot about 'hatred' and 'the fanatics' who
are ruining things for the Good Palestinians.
When we reach the left of the
political spectrum, the analysis will go off in several directions.
We will be told that the Israelis are just as bad, with great
squirming to avoid the clear implication that the Palestinians
must then be bad themselves. We will get some psychologizing
about the mentalities of marginalized, ghettoized, oppressed
peoples. We will hear how the fanaticism of Hamas has its counterpart
in the Christian fanaticism of the West. We will hear a lot
of half-hearted exoneration by indirection, for example that
'the problem' is not Palestinian violence, but that the US supplies
armored bulldozers and other weapons to Israel. We will hear
a lot of excuses for the attacks, because it will be felt that
excuses are in order.
But through all this one underlying
message will be conveyed, by writers of every political persuasion,
sometimes unwittingly, mostly in undertones and presuppositions,
sometimes out loud, especially when pipsqueak 'friends' of the
Palestinians generously offer to share their bold strategic insights,
honed on the leafy campuses of American universities. The message
will be that the Palestinians are crazy or stupid. As you move
from right to left, 'the  Palestinians' will get more qualified--not
all Palestinians, just those who support the attacks. And
moving in the same direction, you will hear first that 'the Palestinians'
are vile antisemites driven by hate, then that most of them are
nice people but then there are these fanatics, then that these
darn Palestinians are screwing up again. And people will ask
why? why? The answers will mostly involve deep ruminations
on Islamic fundamentalism with a little Fanon for spice.
There is another possible theory
on why the Palestinians will keep attacking. It is that they
are rational. That attacks are a rational response does not
mean they are justified or effective; it means that a rational
person might, analysing the Palestinians' alternatives, believe
this. The Palestinians' attacks may be the wrong response for
all sorts of strategic reasons I don't pretend to know: no one
can claim to know the effect of any Palestinian strategy on their
ultimate future.
But among all the uncertain
strategies the Palestinians might adopt, continuing the attacks
is certainly not stupid or suicidal, and therefore cannot be
dismissed as fanaticism. Even if fanatics *are* behind the
attacks, ordinary rational Palestinians would have good if not
decisive reasons to adopt such a strategy.
To see the rationality of the
Palestinian response, it helps to compare Palestine with Algeria
in the early 1960s. There too, the native population fought
an occupying power and well-established 'settlers'.
When the French came to believe
they could not suppress the Algerian revolutionaries, negotiations
took place, over quite some time. The settlers tried to wreck
these negotiations through a terror campaign; the Algerians did
not. Why isn't it the same in the occupied territories?
The crucial difference is that
in Algeria, at least as far as the revolutionaries were concerned,
the situation was static. The settlers were not expanding their
settlement activities. In Israel, they are, even beyond their
need for housing. As the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom
reports, "Although there are 3,700 vacant houses in the
Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, some 6,130 other
houses are under construction. In the largest West Bank settlement
of Maale Adumim, 47% of the housing units remain unsold, and
the figure soars to 97% in Givat Ze'ev, north of Jerusalem."
And the Israeli journalist Amira Hass informs us that the dispossession
of the Palestinians continues as a matter of government policy.
"From July 2005," she says, "the Palestinian
residents of East Jerusalem, carriers of Israeli IDs, will no
longer be permitted to enter Ramallah. That is when construction
will be completed on the wall and the Erez-type passage at Kalandia,
deep inside Palestinian territory. Only those who obtain an entry
permit (and experience teaches us how difficult that is) will
be permitted to pass. I asked the Prime Minister's Office and
the IDF whether this doesn't this contradict two developments:
first, permission for residents of East Jerusalem to vote in
the elections for the head of the Palestinian Authority, and
second, the possibility of calm and a return to final status
negotiations. I received no answer.
That silence tells us, just
as the bulldozers and the soldiers who already prevent Jerusalem
Palestinians from traveling to Ramallah tell us, that Israel
is following her plan: East Jerusalem will be separated from
Ramallah, and of course from Bethlehem." The route of
Israel's 'separation wall', originally along the 1967 border,
now snakes into the West Bank, not only around Jerusalem, and
makes the settler land grab a heavily fortified fact on the ground.
In Palestine, then, the situation--the
'status quo'- is far from static. The Palestinians who continue
their attacks are not trying to 'wreck' any peace process.
They are trying to counter a pattern of encroachment which constantly
works against them, and on which the peace process has no effect.
Israel's good-will gestures,
however sincere, concern everything *but* this encroachment.
Checkpoints are relaxed; troops withdrawn; prisoners released.
Some settlements are evacuated. But settlement activity continues
at about the same pace as before, and on balance the settlements
keep building up. This means, for the present, continually
increasing misery for the Palestinians: less land, fewer resources,
more difficult travel, deteriorating health care, malnutrition,
and the implantation of a hostile population, protected by the
Israeli army and bent on expelling the Palestinians from every
inch remaining to them.
As for the future, the settlements
belong to a long-standing Israeli policy of creating faits accomplis
which expand the self-styled Jewish state at the expense of other
people in the area. This was the reason the early Zionists
were hell-bent on unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine,
why after 1948 Ben Gurion transferred large amounts of state
land to the Jewish National Fund, and why, in 1967, the settlements
were encouraged in the first place. Now the process has to
a large extent fallen into the hands of Jewish fanatics, many
from the US, bent on 'redeeming' Palestine to 'rebuild' a Jewish
empire which almost certainly never existed in the first place.
From this it follows that anything
represented as a pause in the conflict is really a situation
in which the Palestinians are to sit on their hands, while the
deadly encroachment continues at the same pace as before. And
to what end? presumably to cheer on the sort of peace process
which has failed many times before, which lacks not only guarantees
but the faintest assurance that there will be a freeze on settlement
activity. While the Palestinians are to content themselves with
an ever-shrinking pie in the sky, the settlers are to be allowed
a penalty-free go at grabbing as much as they can. Even where
the settlers cannot expand, they will make feverish efforts to
entrench themselves so deeply that the West Bank enclaves, which
prevent the creation of a viable Palestinian state, become immoveable.
Without attacks, and with negotiations underway, the settler
movement will have a much easier time finding new recruits for
its displacement activities. Besides, existing settlers will
no longer see any reason to contemplate leaving--something quite
a few are doing at the moment. Greater, stronger, more extensive
'facts on the ground' will be created, minute by minute, and
even ordinary Israelis, many of whom dislike the settlers, will
stop complaining: less violence, fewer risks for the army, and
less expense will leave little to complain about.
Meanwhile the Palestinians,
helpless inside their sickeningly dense remnants of territory,
will be squeezed some more, and more, and more.
And for how long are the Palestinians
to continue this surrender, to suffer slowly but steadily increasing
loss? Well, everyone involved in the peace process is emphatic
that it will take time, a long time. No one is making any specific
predictions. On November 13th of last year, The Washington Post
reported that "President Bush set a goal yesterday of ensuring
the creation of a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state alongside
Israel before he leaves office in 2009."(http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Half that time is far too long for the Palestinians to give
their settler enemies a free hand at intensifying an already
devastating process of dispossession. Already today, it is
common to hear even supposedly pro-Palestinian commentators tell
you that the settlements are too well established to be removed.
How would things look after another year, or two, or five,
in which the settler movement is given a blank check? What if,
despite a halt to any attacks, the peace process collapses and
leaves the enhanced settlements in place? That's a distinct
possibility anyone would be a fool to ignore.
It is irrational to give up
defending yourself when the other side continues its aggression.
Were there a complete settlement freeze, at least time would
not daily make even the occupied territories, the rump of Palestine,
less and less a place where Palestinians can hope to build a
society.
It is rational to continue
resistance, to continue making the settlers uncomfortable, to
continue the pressure that brought Israeli concessions in the
first place. Unless that pressure is maintained, the settlers
will burrow ever deeper into Palestine, leaving ever less land
and hope for the Palestinians.
This is not to say that keeping
up the attacks is the best policy.
Perhaps the best policy is to march peacefully with flowers in
one's hair--anything is possible. But keeping up the attacks
is a rational policy, one with at least as much chance of succeeding
as any other.
To understand this response,
it is not necessary to understand anything about Islam or Islamic
fundamentalism or any special features of Palestinian culture,
much less the psychology of hate. It is necessary only to see
the Palestinians as rational human beings.
Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent
University in Ontario, Canada. Professor Neumann's views are
not to be taken as those of his university. His book What's
Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just
been republished by Broadview Press. He contributed the essay,
"What is Anti-Semitism", to CounterPunch's book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.
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