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Snow Covered Rubble
by Sam Bahour and Dr. Michael Dahan 4:41pm Wed Feb 26 '03
sbahour@palnet.com & mdahan@attglobal.net

The snow will soon melt and the destroyed homes, bullet riddled walls, tank-rippled roads will re-appear, only to jog the collective memories of those Palestinians that remain the victims of this thirty-six year man-made tragedy called Israeli Occupation.
print article

Snow Covered Rubble

By Sam Bahour and Dr. Michael Dahan*

Without even watching the news (our satellite dishes were buried in the snow 48 hours ago) we can imagine that newspapers and TV stations around the world are running pictures of a snowy Jerusalem and Ramallah. Pastoral pictures of a snow covered Dome of the Rock and Wailing Wall, or perhaps a snow covered Israeli tank in Hebron, or Palestinian children throwing snowballs at Israeli soldiers.

What you won't see on prime time are the thousands of Palestinians sitting in frozen homes and makeshift shelters (for those that have had their homes demolished by the Israeli military), economic deterioration in the Occupied Territories and insane levels of unemployment. For them, the snow is neither pastoral nor uplifting. Even if heating oil can get through the military blockades, people still can't afford to heat their homes. Many are forced to scavenge wood and other combustibles in order to provide at least a minimal amount of heat in a vain attempt to thwart the sub zero temperatures.

Considering the coalition government that is being created following the elections in Israel, this bleak lifestyle for thousands of Palestinians is not likely to change any time soon. Thirsty for power, the ultra-secular Shinui Party has joined forces with the ultra-religious National Religious Party (NRP) whom are supportive of the settlers and uncompromising in terms of peace with Palestinians. In the past the leader of the NRP has been quoted as calling Palestinian Israelis (Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship) “cancer”. They are to be joined by the even further right “Nationalist Union”, a party that supports “transfer” (read ethnic cleansing) of Palestinians within Israel and the re occupied Palestinian Territories. Ten of the 120 Knesset seats will be filled by settlers, in spite of the fact that settlers make up only 3% of Israeli citizens. Together with Sharon they will make sure to bury any hopes of peace underneath blood stained snow covered rubble. One should not expect Sharon and his soon to be finalized government to move one inch further toward any solution that is not a military solution. It is now clear to anyone who had a doubt; a change in the miserable situation on the ground is not likely to come from within Israel. A leopard does not change its spots, neither will Sharon.

What we don't understand, and apparently millions of people around the world don't understand, is why focus on Iraq when the core regional conflict is solvable? Here and now, without war, without tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, without the loss of thousands of lives, a conflict that can be ended by simple and firm U.S. pressure on Israel to move forward, similar to the pressure that has been relentlessly applied to the Palestinians. The four corners of the world know the endgame: two independent nation states, each free from military domination of the other, is not only possible, but inevitable.

If the U.S. wants to show true leadership of the "free world" then they should not be pushing for war in Iraq, a war that seemingly only serves the business agendas of certain individuals within the Bush administration. If they want to show leadership, they must rise to their moral, economic, and most of all, political responsibility to stop the Israeli-Palestinian cycle of violence and the systematic destruction of the Palestinian society by Sharonג€™s war machine. Annihilating a people has never worked in the past; waiting on the sideline to see if it can succeed today is the epitome of failure for the world community.

The snow will soon melt and the destroyed homes, bullet riddled walls, tank-rippled roads will re-appear, only to jog the collective memories of those Palestinians that remain the victims of this thirty-six year man-made tragedy called Israeli Occupation.

End - 26-2-2003

* Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American living in the besieged Palestinian City of Al-Bireh in the West Bank and can be reached at sbahour@palnet.com. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994).
Dr. Michael Dahan is an Israeli-American political scientist and professor living in Jerusalem and can be reached at mdahan@attglobal.net.

www.seruv.org.il/defaulteng.asp

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blah blah blah
by no 6:09pm Wed Feb 26 '03

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blah blah blah blah blah blah blah ... YAWWWWWWWWWNNNN ... anything to actually say yet?

c'mon, give me a story with some substance... not your stupid imagery and storytelling please Mr. Rogers!

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Destroyed Homes
by Swivel 10:08am Thu Feb 27 '03

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The homes destroyed by the IDF belong to those who are involved in terror. A better article would have been to go and visit the families destroyed forever by the actions of those who have to do nothing more than crash on a couch a a short while while Hamas rebuilds the houses, much nicer than before.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. I remember a slew of interviews with mothers of suicide bombers saying how proud they were of their sons and daughers that commit cold-blooded murder. Maybe with the cold blood running through their veins, they won't even feel the snow.

Save it, Sam Bahour. We know you are a self-serving Yahoo wiling to sell your mother up the river for a chance to spread more hate.

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True Liberals want WAR!!
by Peter 8:11am Fri Feb 28 '03

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The Liberal Case for War
By Peter Beinart
February 28, 2003


"Last time, this nation entered a war to make the
world safe for democracy and establish permanent
peace; it was betrayed in the event because its
aims were not embodied in the peace settlement.
Do we now risk such a betrayal again?" Looking
back to World War I, this journal asked that
question on August 25, 1941, in an editorial
called "For a Declaration of War." And that is
the question again today.

Today's war debate also occurs against the
backdrop of a past betrayal. The first Bush
administration rallied the country behind war in
the Gulf with impassioned denunciations of Saddam
Hussein's cruelty. And that moralistic language
helped win over the small contingent of hawkish
liberals--people like Al Gore, Joseph Lieberman,
Bob Graham, and the editors of this magazine--who
gave the war its bipartisan veneer. But, when the
Shia and Kurds rose up against Saddam, in the
naive belief that the United States cared more
about their freedom than Riyadh's displeasure,
Saddam slaughtered them as America's nearby army
watched.

In the ensuing decade, however, several factors
have conspired to dim the memory of that
betrayal. First, while the Gulf war should have
induced cynicism about the use of American power
for liberal ends, it fostered optimism about
American power itself. It showed just how awesome
America's post-cold-war military really was. And
that new awareness of the effectiveness of U.S.
military actions created a new Democratic
awareness of the political risks of opposing
them.

Second, the Gulf war was followed by a succession
of wars that were undeniably liberal in spirit.
Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo conditioned liberals to
see altruistic intervention as the post-cold-war
U.S. norm. Led by an anti-Vietnam president and
scorned by conservative realists as "social
work," these were our wars. Even Afghanistan,
although fought in self-defense, ended one of the
most sinister regimes in modern memory.

For many liberals, none of this justifies war
with Iraq. Suspicion about George W. Bush's
motives, combined with vehement international
opposition and the lack of an imminent threat,
has produced nervous opposition on much of the
moderate left. That opposition is hardly
surprising--it is the logical product of American
liberalism's post-Vietnam inclinations. What is
surprising is the willingness of so many liberals
to turn against that tradition; the fraternity of
liberal hawks is far greater today than during
the Gulf war. The '90s created a historic opening
in the liberal psyche. And the Bush
administration has exploited it. Its suggestion
that war might not only free the people of Iraq
but also set off a democratic chain reaction
throughout the Middle East is tailor-made to
appeal to liberals newly hopeful about American
power. The national security argument for this
war may be based on pessimism about the
inevitable spread of weapons of mass destruction,
but the political argument is based on post-1989
optimism about America's ability to bring liberal
government to every corner of the globe.

It is just this kind of liberal optimism that
historically precedes liberal betrayal. Liberals
support this war because they hope it will bring
certain political results, but they have limited
influence over whether it will be prosecuted with
those results in mind. The Bush administration at
times frames the war in liberal terms, but, then,
it frames its education and budgetary policies in
liberal terms too. And its record on democratic
postwar reconstruction is not encouraging.

In Afghanistan, the Pentagon's dogged resistance
to a nationwide peacekeeping force has condemned
large swaths of the country to warlordism. In
Iraq, the Bush team says it is committed to
turning post-Saddam Iraq into a model for the
Arab world. But its new budget allocates not one
cent for the effort. The justification, as
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith recently testified, is that the cost of
post-Saddam nation-building is "unknowable."
(Someone forgot to tell the United Nations and
the Congressional Budget Office, which have both
recently published estimates.) The truth is that
making Iraq a template for Arab liberalism will
be expensive and protracted. And the Bush
administration won't say so for fear of
undermining public support for the war.

Indeed, the best-case scenario is that the Bush
team is misleading the American people about the
intensive political effort they have in mind once
Saddam is gone. The worst-case scenario is that
no such effort is even planned and that, in the
name of stability, Riyadh and Foggy Bottom will
settle on an Iraqi Pervez Musharaf. It is not a
good sign, as Janine Zacharia recently reported
in these pages (see "Exiled," February 17), that
the closer we get to war, the more despondent the
genuine Iraqi democrats sound.

The unhappy truth is that, if the Bush
administration wins the war but betrays the
peace, the political consequences for the
president will be small. Once the fighting is
over, the American press will turn its attention
elsewhere, just as it has in post-Taliban
Afghanistan. But the consequences for hawkish
liberalism will be great. Having been played for
fools, most liberal hawks will retreat to a deep
skepticism of American power. They will end up on
the decent, feckless left--in the company of
those who sincerely condemn men such as Slobodan
Milosevic and Saddam but have no strategy for
toppling them except empty exhortations to people
power. And that soft isolationism will likely
retake the Democratic Party. On the right, Donald
Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney won't lose sleep if
Chevron and Crown Prince Abdullah run things in
post-Saddam Baghdad rather than Kanan Makiya.
Paul Wolfowitz will either shut up or resign.

Many people would consider this ideological
reshuffling an improvement. At home, liberals
could reclaim the language of human rights for
themselves, secure in the knowledge that it, and
they, would no longer be sullied by an
association with the 82nd Airborne. The collapse
of hawkish liberalism might actually diminish
anti-Americanism abroad since, absent their
liberal allies, Rumsfeld and Cheney would be less
likely to drape their actions in the moralistic
talk Europeans find so grating. After all, no one
protests Russia's intervention in Chechnya on the
streets of Paris and Rome.

But, when the next Bosnia did come along, its
leaders wouldn't find America's new separation
between liberalism and power nearly so
refreshing; between the realist left and the
McGovernite left, they would have nowhere to
turn. The truth is that liberalism has to try to
harness American military power for its purposes
because American tanks and bombs are often the
only things that bring evil to heel. Opposing
this war might have helped liberals retain their
purity, but it would have done nothing for the
people suffering under Saddam. If liberals are
betrayed a second time in the Gulf, hawkish
liberalism may well go into temporary eclipse.
But one day we, and they, will need it again.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Beinart is an editor of The New Republic.

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what a dirty bunch of right-wingers....
by jew with a conscience 1:58pm Wed Mar 12 '03

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reading the comments above makes me sick....the IDF has been demoloshing arab homes since 1948, it has been expropriating land at even more rabid rate.....only self-deluding fools think this is about Hamas's terrorism. this is fascism par excellence! what does destroying a ministry of culture and education have to do with combatting terrorism?! And how does the expansion of Maale Adumim (now twice the size of Tel Aviv!!) increase security?! Today in Israeli society ethnic cleansing (under the guise of 'transfer') is openly and quite legitmately talked about by the media and politician alike! Remember that tables always turn and that what goes up must come down. Remebr Milosevic.... remeber Goering... they would have never guessed....

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Good Evening
by Miklos Platthy 9:02am Sun Mar 16 '03
address: Australia mplatthy@hotmail.com

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Good evening to everybody

Less talk more journalism. If one wanted to go to a forum, there a thousands on the Web. For indymedia to be a credible Alternative media site then there must be journalistic guidelines to follow.

If I am studying a subject whether it is the proposed War on Iraq or an oil spill in the Pacific Ocean, then I do not wish to read simply one persons opinion of events that have no basis other than their own judgements. What indymedia needs is less judgement. From what I have seen there are many indymedia sites that are blossoming, reporting facts that have been neglected in the mainstream media or not published at all. For indymedia to flourish I must realise that I am responsible for indymedia, that I am responsible for the world around me. The realisation that I am 'the world' is all that is necessary for this sense of responsibility to come about. For my world is my nourishment, and for me to be properly nourished I must contribute to the world that I depend on. I have frequently in the past seen with the eyes of a separate observer, as if I had no relation whatsoever to the events passing around me. I do not wish to change you or to bring about change, this is not an action born of desire, but of care. I care...I love..... A love that is not born from a feeling of emptiness or attachment, but a love that resonates throughout reality as a bell resonates through the air. A love that awakens one to the 'reality' and not the fancy of self* (*a self born from previous experience, that has been developed, that believes and that wishes everything to be different). To see the world as if one had never seen it before, the movements, the breeze and awaken an interest that has lied dormant for so long.

It is this sense of care or understanding that brings about a revolution in mind and attitude, a revolution that occurs within ones heart. A revolution that changes everything.


A few questions and points which I put forward before I cease my writing.

*Why do you write? Is this action born from a desire to change, and where does this desire come from?

*I see indymedia not for what it was, but what it is. Indymedia is an Internet community that has been set up specifically to give and 'open' media to the peoples of the world, it is a project that encourages people to write, to care, to participate, to be inspired and to challenge the values that have been entrenched in the collective consciousness of our communities, whether we are from the US, India, the UK, Latin America or anywhere for that matter. I myself am from Sydney and the more I read, the more I realise that I see myself in the opinions and the stories that are put forth. Somewhere within me is the desire to trivialise and to ridicule. Where is that emotion born?

Enough chatter from me.

Love

Miklos

P.S. With regards to the volunteers that make indymedia possible. A question to you: What role does Catalyst play in keeping Indymedia running at www.indymedia.org? Or what role did the play in creating it?

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