Archived news and commentary: June 23 - 29, 2003

2003/06/23 - 2003/06/29
2003/06/16 - 2003/06/22
2003/06/09 - 2003/06/15
2003/06/02 - 2003/06/08
2003/05/26 - 2003/06/01
2003/05/19 - 2003/05/25
2003/05/12 - 2003/05/18
2003/05/05 - 2003/05/11
2003/04/28 - 2003/05/04
2003/04/21 - 2003/04/27
2003/04/14 - 2003/04/20
2003/04/07 - 2003/04/13
2003/03/31 - 2003/04/06

Sunday, June 29, 2003

News and commentary:

"Document: Complete Text of Hamas/Islamic Jihad Declaration" (IMRA, 2003/06/29)
A translation of the conditional cease-fire declaration:
"STATEMENT OF INITIATIVE
...we declare the following initiative:
A. Suspension of the military operations against the Zionist enemy for three months, effective today, in return for the following conditions:
1. An immediate cessation of all forms of Zionist aggression against our Palestinian people including incursions, demolitions, closures and sieges on cities, villages and refugee camps. This includes the siege imposed on President Yasser Arafat, house demolitions, levelling of agricultural land and assaults against land, property and Christian and Islamic holy sites, especially the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque. In addition, the immediate cessation of all individual assassination operations, massacres, all arrests and deportations against our people, leaders, cadres and fighters.
2. The release of all prisoners and detainees, Palestinian and Arab, from occupation prisons without condition or restriction and the return to their homes first and foremost of those who have spent long periods and those with lengthy sentences, women, children, the sick and elderly.
B. In the event that the enemy does not heed these conditions and commitments, or breaches any of them, we see ourselves unencumbered by this initiative and we hold the enemy responsible for the consequences.
Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) Islamic Jihad"

"The Politics of Mass Destruction" (Richard Spertzel, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/06/29)
"As I've said time and again, expecting any inspection regime to find a massive cache of WMDs is a lesson in self-delusion. Such folly can only bring cheer to those who opposed the war in the first place and to those who simply oppose the Bush administration. ...
Then, why have such weapons not been found? The answer may lie in the training and experience of the inspectors. The initial team looking for WMDs in Iraq was more reminiscent of site exploiters than inspectors. True, if they found a bomb or missile warhead, they were capable of further exploitation of the find to determine its contents. But they apparently did not have testing instruments capable of detecting trace amounts of biological-weapons agents. ...
Let there be no doubt, Iraq retained an active biological-weapons program. Unscom had adequate evidence of such. In 1998, presented with the evidence, the leading biological-weapons experts from the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Ukraine, Romania and Canada all agreed with the Unscom findings and observations. Incredibly, U.S. and British politicians with little or no knowledge of biological weapons and biological warfare are choosing to believe otherwise."

"O'Connor makes catchphrase law of the land" (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 2003/06/29)
The inherent racialism of "diversity": '''Diversity' doesn't extend to, say, some dirtpoor piece of fundamentalist white trash. Her presence wouldn't ''enrich'' anyone. ''Diversity'' means ''more blacks.'' That's why traditional African-American colleges are exempt from its strictures: As 100 percent black schools, they're already as diverse as you can get.
As a general rule, the more noisily an institution proclaims its commitment to diversity, the more slumped in homogeneity it gets - at least when it comes to the only diversity that matters, not diversity of race or gender or orientation, but diversity of ideas. Take the New York Times and its star columnist Maureen Dowd. Of all the various aspects of the judgment, the one that took Maureen's fancy was that a black man had had the effrontery to vote against quotas for blacks! Pronouncing Clarence Thomas ''barking mad,'' she declared, ''He knew that he could not make a powerful legal argument against racial preferences, given the fact that he got into Yale Law School and got picked for the Supreme Court thanks to his race.''
Really? He didn't get into Yale on merit? Only because he was black? How does she know? And, by taking it as read that he's only there to make up the race numbers, doesn't she inadvertently confirm Thomas' point? That the cult of diversity stigmatizes all blacks: No matter how high they soar, the assumption of white liberals like Miss Dowd is that it's because of white liberals making allowances for them.'' (See also: "Could Thomas Be Right?" (Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, 2003/06/25))

"Rights and wrongs" (Melissa Radler, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/29)
An interview with Anne Bayefsky:
"How could it get worse?
The road map shows the way. The road map calls for a Palestinian state with provisional borders by December 2003. UN resolutions will call for implementation of the road map and a Palestinian state by the end of December. If the Palestinian Authority was to make a unilateral declaration of independence, there will be huge pressure to give that entity international recognition, and that means statehood without any Israeli input. Widely recognized statehood would mean that if Israel were to think that its self-defense depended on taking action in those lands, it would then be violating international borders, which would mean a declaration of war, with all its enormous regional implications. That's where we're headed: the downfall of one terrorist state in Iraq and the creation of another in the same region within a matter of months, with the blessing of the UN and, sadly at this point, it seems with the blessing of the United States."

"Outrage as Oxford bans student for being Israeli" (Julie Henry, The Sunday Telegraph, 2003/06/29)
"I am sure that you are perfectly nice at a personal level..." This is quite simply apartheid with a friendly face: "An Oxford University professor has provoked outrage by rejecting an application from an Israeli PhD student purely because of his nationality.
Andrew Wilkie, the Nuffield professor of pathology and a fellow of Pembroke College, is under investigation after telling Amit Duvshani, a student at Tel Aviv university, that he and many other British academics were not prepared to take on Israelis because of the "gross human rights abuses" he claims that they inflict on Palestinians. ...
In a reply sent by email on June 23, Prof Wilkie wrote: "Thank you for contacting me, but I don't think this would work. I have a huge problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they [the Palestinians] wish to live in their own country.
'I am sure that you are perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the only UK scientist with these views but I'm sure you will find another lab if you look around.'"

"Contacts cut with BBC after worldwide broadcast of inflammatory documentary" (The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/29)
"Why has the world demanded UN inspections in Iraq, but not similar inspections on Israel? Does Israel use nerve gas against Palestinians? The London Times reports that after the BBC broadcast its provocative documentary Israel's Secret Weapon on its World Service channel, Israel has broken off contact with the venerable broadcasting organization known as "Auntie".
According to the report, confirmed Sunday by the Government Press Office, Israeli officials will refuse BBC interviews, impose visa restrictions, and be decidedly unhelpful to the BBC at road blocks and Ben-Gurion Airport. ...
"The attitude of the BBC is more than a pure journalistic matter," he [Daniel Seaman, director of the government press office] explained to The Times. 'It is dangerous to the existence of the State of Israel because it demonizes the Israelis and gives our terrorist enemies reasons to attack us.'" (See also the transcript of the documentary: "Israel's Secret Weapon" (BBC News, 2003/03/17): "The Israeli army has used new unidentified weapons. In February 2001 a new gas was used in Gaza. A hundred and eighty patients were admitted to hospitals with severe convulsions. ... Israel is outside chemical and biological weapons treaties and still refuses to say what the new gas was.")

"A mischievous place" (Ernest W. Lefever, The Washington Times, 2003/06/29)
"The recent election of Cuba to another three-year term on the U.N. Human Rights Commission shortly after Fidel Castro jailed 78 opponents of his regime and executed three accused hijackers is further evidence the United Nations is "a dangerous place," as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it. The U.N. also is a mischievous place where consensus is confused with morality. ...
The Security Council is powerless. It has no army, no territory, no economy, no citizens. It has no farms or factories, universities or cathedrals. And most important, it has no historical memory. The council is an artifice of the liberal imagination.
The real actors in the quest for security and freedom in a dangerous world are sovereign states, a motley crew, that use the council to pursue their own interests. The fateful decisions of war and peace and human rights are made by sovereign states, not by U.N. resolutions or U.N. peacekeepers dispatched to trouble spots. Neither the dreams of Woodrow Wilson nor of latter-day idealists can alter this hard fact."

"Source of discontent" (David Aaronovitch, The Observer, 2003/06/29)
Aaronovitch on the 10 Downing Street vs. BBC case: "Then came Gilligan's famous judgment that the hiatus in the immediate aftermath of the war meant that Iraqis were experiencing their 'first days of freedom in more fear than they have ever known before'. Gilligan had been in Baghdad for a matter of weeks, had met very few ordinary Iraqis and none under unconstrained circumstances. It was a judgment he simply wasn't in a position to make. Number 10 responded with: 'Try telling that to people put in shredders or getting their tongues cut out.'
I know, from my time there, how the BBC will resort to disingenuousness with the best of them. When Gilligan was (rightly) criticised, the BBC's response was to insist that Gilligan had merely been reporting 'heightened fears of immediate violence'. In a speech on 24 April, director-general Greg Dyke referred to 'Downing Street's attempts to rubbish Andrew Gilligan's reports on the plight of ordinary Iraqis, as looters ran amok in Baghdad'. He did not admit that Gilligan's words were eminently rubbishable.
Similarly disingenuous has been the Beeb's argument that all it had done was report what the source said, and that the Corporation itself clearly had no view as to its truth. Once again, in The Observer piece partly quoted by Sambrook, Hinsliff and Beaumont wrote: 'Defence reporter Andrew Gilligan was claiming that key elements of the dossier on Iraq - were thrown in to "sex up" painfully thin material - against the wishes of intelligence officers.' That was their impression and mine. And the whole tone of the Today programme lent itself to that perception."

"BBC set to sue Minister over Iraq 'lies' claim" (Kamal Ahmed and Martin Bright, The Observer, 2003/06/29)
"The unprecedented row between the Government and the BBC took a dramatic twist last night when Andrew Gilligan, the reporter at the centre of claims that Number 10 deliberately 'sexed up' evidence against Saddam Hussein, announced he was ready to sue a serving Minister.
Gilligan, the defence correspondent for Radio 4's Today programme, said that he would take legal action against Phil Woolas, the Deputy Leader of the House, unless he received a full apology for allegations made against him." (See also: "Sound and fury over the BBC" (Nicholas Watt and Janine Gibson, The Guardian, 2003/06/28))

"In the Land of Guantánamo" (Ted Conover, The New York Times Magazine, 2003/06/29)
"The juvenile enemy combatants live in a prison called Camp Iguana. It looks like a pair of tennis courts surrounded by fence lined with a few extra layers of the usual green-nylon wind screen. It is perched on a bluff overlooking the sea; the breeze is warm and pleasant. Not far away is a beachside park for barbecues and picnics and a wildlife-viewing area, but the young detainees don't visit these places. They must remain in one bedroom of a small cinder-block hut inside the fence or, for two or three hours a day, in the grassy yard that adjoins it.
There is a soccer ball in this small yard, and a Nerf football. A translator who is here all day long - the same one who leads their study of the Koran, who is also trying to show them how to write their own names in English - has taught them how to throw the football. They also play board games like chess and something called Popomatic Trouble. They pray. When they are done with their studies, they are given ice-cream sandwiches, which the guards say they love, and they watch videos: Disney cartoons and documentaries about the sea. ''They're very interested in the ocean,'' a guard tells me. They can see it through a wide window that has been cut in the green fence-netting on the ocean side."

Saturday, June 28, 2003

News and commentary:

"Remains of missing U.S. soldiers found" (CNN.com, 2003/06/28)
"The remains of two U.S. Army soldiers who disappeared Wednesday north of Baghdad have been found, U.S. Central Command announced Saturday.
The remains were recovered approximately 20 miles northwest of Baghdad, Central Command said, after an exhaustive search using helicopters, armored vehicles and tanks.
The soldiers - Sgt. 1st Class Gladimir Philippe, 37, of Linden, New Jersey, and Pfc. Kevin Ott, 27, of Columbus, Ohio - were last reported traveling in a Humvee near a checkpoint when military officials lost contact with them.
It was not immediately clear how they died, but the checkpoint has been the site of attacks against U.S. forces.
Six people were in custody in connection with the case, officials said."

"Iraq's Real Weapons Threat" (Rolf Ekeus, The Washington Post Outlook, from the 2003/06/29 issue)
It's a pleasure to present a prudent Swede after months of embarrassingly stupid remarks from Hans Blix. Rolf Ekeus was executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997:
"Detractors of Bush and Blair have tried to make political capital of the presumed discrepancy between the top-level assurances about Iraq's possession of chemical weapons (and other WMD) and the inability of invading forces to find such stocks. The criticism is a distortion and trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security. ...
This combination of researchers, engineers, know-how, precursors, batch production techniques and testing is what constituted Iraq's chemical threat - its chemical weapon. The rather bizarre political focus on the search for rusting drums and pieces of munitions containing low-quality chemicals has tended to distort the important question of WMD in Iraq and exposed the American and British administrations to unjustified criticism. ...
This is enough to justify the international military intervention undertaken by the United States and Britain. To accept the alternative - letting Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability - would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the gulf, including future nuclearization of the region, threats to the world's energy supplies, leakage of WMD technology and expertise to terrorist networks, systematic sabotage of efforts to create and sustain a process of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the continued terrorizing of the Iraqi people." (See also: "The Politics of Mass Destruction" (Richard Spertzel, The Wall Street Journal/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/06/27))

"Galloway issues writ against Daily Telegraph over Iraqi cash claims" (Jamie Wilson, The Guardian, 2003/06/28)
"The controversial anti-war MP George Galloway yesterday issued high court libel proceedings against the Daily Telegraph over a claim that he was in the pay of Saddam Hussein.
The writ follows the publication of documents by the newspaper in April, apparently discovered in a burnt-out foreign ministry building in Baghdad and purporting to be from an Iraqi spy chief, that suggested he had demanded money from the Iraqi regime under the oil-for-food programme. ...
Last night Mr Galloway said he did not want to discuss the forthcoming legal battle. "The issuing of writs speaks for itself, I think," the MP said." (See also: "No, Mr Galloway, you're not in the clear yet" (Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/06/21))

"Sound and fury over the BBC" (Nicholas Watt and Janine Gibson, The Guardian, 2003/06/28)
"Richard Sambrook, the BBC's director of news, wrote to the prime minister's director of communications: "I do not accept the validity of your attacks on our journalism, and on Andrew Gilligan in particular. We have to believe that you are conducting a personal vendetta against a particular journalist whose reports on a number of occasions have caused you discomfort."
His sharply worded letter, stretching to eight pages, was immediately rejected by Downing Street as "weasel words and sophistry". Mr Campbell made clear that he would not let the matter drop as he said: 'BBC standards are now debased beyond belief. It means the BBC can broadcast anything and take responsibility for nothing.'" (See also: "Campbell accuses BBC of lying" (Philip Webster and David Charter, The Times, 2003/06/26))

"Accord Reported on Israeli Pullout From Gaza Areas" (James Bennet, The New York Times, 2003/06/28)
"Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached agreement tonight for Israeli forces to begin withdrawing from areas of the Gaza Strip and returning security control to Palestinian officers, officials familiar with the negotiations said.
The withdrawal, which could begin Sunday, would be the first joint step forward, beyond oratory, under a new international peace plan known as the road map."

Added in archive:
"The Hamas Challenge to Fatah" (Jonathan Schanzer, The Middle East Quarterly, from the Spring 2003 issue)

Friday, June 27, 2003

News and commentary:

"Hamas Says It Decided to Suspend Attacks on Israelis" (Nidal al-Mughrabi, Reuters, 2003/06/27)
"The Palestinian militant group Hamas said on Friday it had decided to suspend attacks on Israelis, a move that could give a significant boost to a U.S.-backed peace "road map" battered by violence.
"Hamas has studied all the developments and has reached a decision to call a truce, or a suspension of fighting activities," Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told Reuters.
He said the cease-fire carried conditions and a timeframe but declined to give details or indicate when a truce would be announced. Hamas, dedicated to Israel's destruction, has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings."

"EU Commission rebuffs Bush on Hamas" (Reuters/MSNBC, 2003/06/27)
"The European Commission on Friday brushed off pressure from U.S. President George W. Bush for the European Union to put the Palestinian militant group Hamas on its list of outlawed terrorist organisations. ...
''You can't say that the whole of Hamas is a terrorist organisation and certainly that is not our position,'' said Reijo Kemppinen, chief spokesman of the executive Commission.
''Clearly there is some disagreement'' (with the U.S. view), Kemppinen told a news briefing.
Kemppinen cited the organisation's social welfare activities, such as running clinics and schools, for which he suggested funding was legitimate."

"The Politics of Mass Destruction" (Richard Spertzel, The Wall Street Journal/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/06/27)
Spertzel was head of the biological-weapons section of UNSCOM from 1994-99: "Even as evidence is uncovered that Saddam Hussein was planning to revive his nuclear-weapons program at the earliest possible date, politicians and pundits alike lament the failure of coalition forces to find a "smoking gun." Despite the recent discovery of plans and parts for a uranium-enrichment centrifuge, some presidential candidates have accused the Bush administration of lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify the war with Iraq.
Such assertions ignore all that has been learned and has transpired during the last 12-plus years. ...
Let there be no doubt, Iraq retained an active biological-weapons program. UNSCOM had adequate evidence of such. In 1998, presented with the evidence, the leading biological-weapons experts from the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Ukraine, Romania and Canada all agreed with the UNSCOM findings and observations. Incredibly, U.S. and British politicians with little or no knowledge of biological weapons and biological warfare are choosing to believe otherwise." (See also: "U.S.: Banned arms evidence in Iraq" (MSNBC, 2003/06/25))

"The Man With No Ear" (Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 2003/06/27)
"Since I've been accusing the Bush administration of cooking the intelligence on Iraq, I should confess my intentions. Countless Iraqis warned me that they would turn to guerrilla warfare if U.S. troops overstay their welcome, so I thought I'd find an Iraqi who had had his tongue or ear amputated by Saddam's thugs and still raged about the U.S. That would powerfully convey what a snake pit we're in.
So I began asking for people with missing tongues or ears. I got a tip about a man in Basra who had had his tongue amputated for criticizing Saddam. He had moved away, but I found a friend of his, Abdel Karim Hassan.
"A thousand thanks to Bush!" he told me. "A thousand thanks to Bush's mother for giving birth to him!"
Hmmm. I hadn't expected a tribute to the Mother of all Bushes. ...
Mr. Abid Ali deserted the Iraqi Army, was caught, taken to a hospital and given general anesthesia — and woke up with no right ear.
"Children looked at me, and turned away in horror," Mr. Abid Ali said bitterly.
So I asked Mr. Abid Ali what he thought of the Americans.
He thought for a moment and said: 'I'd like to make a statue in gold of President Bush.'"

"The law of the peace process" (Caroline B. Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/27)
"It was the government that decided to allow Abu H'meid and thousands of other terrorists to go free over the past decade. And it is the government that, to no small extent, bears responsibility for allowing them to murder again.
Today we see that the hope engendered by the 1993 Oslo Accords and by George W. Bush's speech last year demanding Palestinian reform proved to be baseless. Mahmoud Abbas is a terrorist, and so his security chief, Muhammad Dahlan. Neither man has any intention of either ending terrorism or enacting reforms that would allow for political participation by Palestinians who oppose the PLO's aim to destroy Israel.
On Thursday morning, Dahlan's "security" chief in Gaza, Rashid Abu Shabak, announced that his forces are willing to take security responsibility in Gaza. But Shabak himself is wanted for murder by Israel.
In an Israel governed by the rule of law, not only would the government not be negotiating with Dahlan, Abbas, and their ilk, it would be trying them for murder and sending them to prison. Amazingly, what we find is that far from bringing democracy and peace to Palestinian society, every move by Israel to placate the Palestinian leadership has involved the undermining of Israel as a state of laws."

"Key Riyadh bombings suspect gives up" (CNN.com, 2003/06/27)
"A key suspect the May 12 terror attacks in Riyadh has turned himself in, U.S. and Saudi officials said Thursday.
Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, who authorities said has deep ties to al Qaeda, surrendered Thursday to Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the third ranking official in the Saudi Interior Ministry, a Saudi official told CNN. ...
The Saudi official said he believed the break in the Riyadh case came after the June 14 bust by Saudi authorities of a suspected terror ring in Mecca, one of Islam's holiest sites.
During the bust, Saudi authorities discovered, among other things, what one official described as "booby-trapped Korans," the Muslim holy book.
That discovery, said this official, may have been a final straw of sorts for Saudi religious leaders, who denounced the plot for its double hypocrisy in allegedly plotting a terror attack in Mecca and in waging a holy war against infidels using Islam's holiest book."

"U.S. Troops Search for Two Missing GIs in Iraq; Two Americans Killed in Separate Incidents" (AP/FOX News, 2003/06/27)
"American troops and helicopters scoured the desert Thursday for two U.S. soldiers who were apparently abducted from an observation post north of Baghdad. Ambushes and hostile fire elsewhere in Iraq killed at least one U.S. soldier and two Iraqi civilians and wounded eight other Americans. ...
An Iraqi police official, Brig. Ahmed Khazem, called the ambushes "isolated actions ... carried out by individual mercenaries."
The Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera, however, aired statements Thursday from two previously unknown groups urging assaults on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
One, by a group calling itself the Mujahedeen of the Victorious Sect, claimed responsibility for recent attacks and promised more. The other, by the Popular Resistance for the Liberation of Iraq, called for "revenge" against America."

Thursday, June 26, 2003

News and commentary:

"In the middle: 'The Arab States'"
(Al Watan/HonestReporting, 2003/05/13 [2003/06/26])
"Qatar recently served as combat operations center for American forces in the Iraq war. Yet even in this moderate Arab state, the anti-Israeli and anti-American hatred persists. The Qatari newspaper, Al Watan, whose chairman and half-owner are senior government officials, recently published the following cartoon..." (See also: "Anti-Semitic Cartoons in Qatar's Al-Watan" (ADL, 2003/06/16))

"Palestinian Bush-Wacking" (HonestReporting, 2003/06/26)
"Imagine if the Israeli government called President Bush "the head of the snake," described America as sinking into "a putrid swamp," and made sexist and racist remarks about Condoleezza Rice.
How would this affect media presentation of Israel — specifically, Israel's sincerity in pursuing the American-led peace effort? These remarks, no doubt, would be broadly reported to illustrate a fierce, official Israeli rejection of America's leadership and its plan to move beyond ancient hatreds.
Now here's what really happened:
On June 3 in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the Palestinian Authority's Deputy Foreign Minister Adli Sadeq called President Bush "the head of the snake of the American oppression," and opined, "America is sinking deeper and deeper in a putrid swamp, and will extricate itself from it only as a defeated, stinking loser."
Then on June 26, in the official PA daily Al-Ayyam, columnist Hassan Al-Batal submitted a sexist and racist profile of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, remarking that "she has a figure no less fine than that of supermodel Naomi Campbell," then labelling Rice "the black spinster" and warning to "beware the lady of steel."
Why did these statements fail to make Western headlines?"

"Saddam's mouthpiece re-emerges" (CNN.com, 2003/06/26)
"Ex-Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf re-emerged on Arab television screens claiming the U.S. released him after questioning.
The minister, who was ridiculed in the U.S. and UK for his daily media briefings alleging Iraqi successes during the war, said Thursday the battle had been a "very difficult time. Not just on one man, but on all."
With white hair and without his trademark beret and grin he appeared subdued compared to his usual combative style.
He appeared on Arabic news channel Al-Arabiya and Abu Dhabi TV. The interviews were recorded in Baghdad Thursday."

"The first casualty of Pilger..." (John Sweeney, The Spectator, from the 2003/06/28 issue)
"And then there's the 'Hiroshima effect' of depleted uranium. Pilger wrote in the Daily Mirror just before the war, 'Depleted uranium [is] a sinister component of tank shells and airborne missiles. In truth, it is a form of nuclear warfare, and all the evidence suggests that its use in the Gulf war in 1991 has caused an epidemic in southern Iraq: what the doctors there call "the Hiroshima effect", especially among children.' That the cancer rates from 1991 onwards are the fault of the West's depleted-uranium weapons alone was one of Saddam's central messages. ...
Hang on a minute. Cancers don't happen overnight. They develop after a latency period of at least four years. The Iraqis reported a rash of cancers in the south from 1992 onwards. The cancers that happened in 1992 cannot, scientifically, have been caused in 1992 — or 1991 when the depleted uranium was used — but at least four years before that. 'To say any different is ridiculous; it would deny the evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki,' Dr Nick Plowman, the head of oncology at Barts, told me. ...
None of the cancers and birth defects that Pilger's researcher dates back to 1992 can be the fault of depleted uranium. To omit the possibility that some of the cancers were caused by Saddam's chemical weapons is to misrepresent the facts. To imply by that omission that depleted uranium is solely responsible for the cancers and birth defects in Iraq as he does in his book, his film and in the Daily Mirror is a disgrace to journalism.
I accuse John Pilger of cheating the public and favouring a dictator." (See also: "Blood of Innocents - Doctors say Hussein, not UN sanctions, caused children's deaths" (Matthew McAllester, Newsday.com, 2003/05/23) and "Saddam's Patsies" (George F. Will, New York Post, 2002/10/01))

"Securing the Gulf" (Kenneth M. Pollack, Foreign Affairs, from the July/August 2003 issue)
"With Saddam Hussein gone, a broad rethinking of U.S. strategy toward the region is necessary, because in some ways the security problems of the Persian Gulf are now likely to get more challenging instead of less. ...
The three main problems likely to bedevil Persian Gulf security over the next several years will be Iraq's security dilemma, Iran's nuclear weapons program, and potential internal unrest in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to these problems separately, let alone together, and so difficult tradeoffs will have to be made. ...
If a return to offshore balancing might be inadequate to deal with external aggression and a new alliance system might be inadequate to deal with internal instability, a third course offers the tantalizing prospect of handling both problems simultaneously. This approach would have the United States pursue a security condominium for the Persian Gulf, modeled on the arms control experiences in Europe at the end of the Cold War. ...
Ultimately, the intention would be to proceed to eventual arms control agreements that might include demilitarized zones, bans on destabilizing weapons systems, and balanced force reductions for all parties. In particular, the group might aim for a ban on all WMD, complete with penalties for violators and a multilateral (or international) inspection program to enforce compliance."

"Is Tony Blair the Hulk?" (Tina Brown, Salon,com, 2003/06/26)
Brown on Peter Stothard's "Thirty Days", "his Bob Woodwardian, up-close-and-personal diary of the scene at No. 10 Downing Street as Blair and his inner circle prepared for the war with Iraq": "Stothard paints a portrait of a prime minister in a hurry, for whom the Labor Party and the House of Commons itself are just obstacles he has to navigate to get what he wants done. ...
Stothard makes a persuasive case that Blair's Iraq policy was based on conviction, not on kowtowing to America. The Bush/Blair relationship is one of deal partners, rather than prayer partners. No one at this point should attribute Blair's position on Iraq to sycophancy. "What amazes me is how happy people are for Saddam to stay," he ruminates to his team. 'They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can, you should.'"

"A Tyrant in the Shadows" (John S. Burnett, The New York Times, 2003/06/26)
A report from the Iraqi town Tanoonma: "The reports that Saddam Hussein may be alive and hiding inside Iraq — and inspiring his newly confident followers to attack and kill occupation soldiers — have raced through this town as if carried by the desert's famous Shamal wind. The fear of the dictator's return is seared so deeply in the collective psyche that if the Pentagon were to announce DNA tests proving he is dead, few here would have the ability, the strength, to believe it. The specter of Saddam Hussein remains a powerful destabilizing force, robbing the people of a basic human right: freedom from fear.
Now there are other powerful forces at work, feeding other concerns, and the talk of anarchy is not far off the mark. I was a relief worker in Somalia after American troops withdrew in 1994, and I witnessed the brutal results of more than a decade of lawlessness. Anarchy is a firestorm that cannot be controlled, no matter how determined an occupying power is to set things right. Remove a dictator and watch chaos grow."

"Getting out of a war is always harder than getting into one" (John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/06/26)
"Post-Ottoman Iraq has never been an easy country to govern. Only under Saddam, who sustained his tyranny by terror, has rule from Baghdad been country-wide. Even so, both the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs gave him frequent trouble.
The current situation therefore perpetuates a pattern that has persisted since 1918. What is remarkable is that, so far, there have been so few casualties among the Anglo-American forces. It has been complacent of the British to believe that their relaxed method of internal policing would spare them losses. ...
A better solution is that of recreating an Iraqi national army, as the British did in the 1920s. There is plenty of raw material - the 200,000 unemployed soldiers at present not under orders and only erratically paid. Their discontent is fuelling the disorder.
It must be a matter of priority to enlist as many as possible, give them Western training and use them to replace the American and British soldiers patrolling the cities and countryside. That programme will take several years until it is completed. Casualties among the Western occupation forces will, meanwhile, continue."

"Bush likes Dahlan, believes Abbas, and has 'a problem with Sharon'" (Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, 2003/06/26)
A Holocaust denier who is incapable of lying? An interesting account from the Aqaba summit: "According to one of the participants in the three-way meeting of the delegations, a lot can be learned about the swinging American pendulum from the Israeli side to the Palestinian side. ...
Mofaz burst in at the end of Dahlan's presentation and said: "Well, they won't be getting any help from us; they have their own security service."
You could see that Bush was irritated, says the participant, and he turned on Mofaz angrily: "Their own security service? But you have destroyed their security service."
Mofaz shook his head and said: "I do not think that we can help them, Mr. President," - to which Bush said: "Oh, but I think that you can. And I think that you will." ...
After that meeting, Bush turned to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and said, 'We have a problem with Sharon I can see, but I like that young man [Dahlan] and I think their prime minister is incapable of lying. I hope that they will be successful. We can work with them.'"

"Campbell accuses BBC of lying" (Philip Webster and David Charter, The Times, 2003/06/26)
"Alastair Campbell unleashed an extraordinary onslaught on the BBC yesterday for lying, bad journalism and having a hidden agenda against the war with Iraq. Tony Blair’s communications director turned a rare public appearance intended to defend government handling of Iraq intelligence into a ferocious attack that startled the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.
He said that he and Tony Blair had demanded an apology — and would go on demanding it — over persistent BBC reports suggesting that the Government had asked the intelligence services to "sex up" their report last September on the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons — particularly by suggesting that they could be deployed at 45 minutes notice. ...
"I simply say in relation to the BBC story — it is a lie," he said, adding that in the run-up to the conflict 'there was an agenda in large parts of the BBC ... there was a disproportionate focus upon the dissent, the opposition to our position.'" (See also: "BBC hits back in Iraq row" (Jason Deans, The Guardian, 2003/06/26): "'Alastair Campbell yesterday seriously misrepresented the BBC's journalism. He said we had accused him and the prime minister of lying. That's not true, we haven't. He said we accused the prime minister of misleading the Commons. We have never said any such thing,' Mr Sambrook told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning. ... 'Frankly I don't think the BBC needs to be taught lessons in the use of sources by a communications department which plagiarised a 12-year-old thesis and distributed unattributed.'")

"Last stand at Majar al-Kabir" (David Blair, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/06/26)
"Dark bloodstains trailing along the corridor showed how the struggle had ended, leaving six British soldiers murdered inside a bullet-scarred police station in southern Iraq.
The debris of a desperate struggle - shards of glass, charred fragments of plaster and the empty casing of a heavy calibre machinegun round - lay strewn across the concrete floor.
The soldiers from the Royal Military Police had held out against an enraged mob, thousands strong, for about two hours, isolated and alone after their radio was lost with their Land Rover. ...
Abbas Baiphy, 25, was one of about 15 Iraqi policemen in the station with the Britons. He said the crowd was armed with AK-47s and heavy machineguns. The noise it made was so deafening that no individual cry or chant could be identified. ...
The violence has not had a sobering effect on the town. People are braced for British retaliation and give warning of more bloodshed.
"The same thing will happen again," said Mohammed Hassan, 24, a nurse at the hospital. 'We are Muslims. We do not accept any foreigner in our land except as a guest.'" (See also: "They refused to flee the mob ... duty made them stay behind the doorway to death" (Daniel McGrory and Michael Evans, The Times, 2003/06/26): "Ali al-Ateya, an Iraqi radio journalist, claims that he saw the Britons offering to surrender their weapons after two of their colleagues had already been shot dead. Ringleaders snatched the rifles and killed the soldiers. "They shot the British in the head, several times. The executioners were standing right in front of the Britons," he said.")

Added in archive:
"The legacy of relativism" (Kenan Malik, kenanmalik.com, June 2003)
"Commencement Address at the Naval War College" (Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. Department of Defense, 2003/06/20)

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

News and commentary:

"Isolationism Redux: History and the Current Conflict" (Ronald Radosh, Foundation For the Defense of Democracies, 2003/06/25)
Radosh "describes how the antiwar protests that emerged during the Iraq intervention revived the slogans and clichés of the isolationist movement in America before the Second World War.":
"When Japan finally attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, Beard and others saw that attack as an act to which Japan had been driven by an intransigent American policy. Even Pearl Harbor, to the isolationists, was America's fault. And as today, the isolationists argued that the U.S. was approaching war because of the dire influence of big business. There was, in other words, no legitimate interest in protecting our nation’s national security.
There are so many similarities, in the pre-World War II arguments of the opponents of interventionism, to those made today by opponents of any military action against Iraq. Let us take up the argument that waging war means the onset of fascist repression at home. Lindbergh's statements appear eerily similar to many made today. We are frequently warned that if we go to war against Saddam Hussein, we will be saddled with an endless commitment to Iraq, in effect a permanent occupation. Speaking in 1939, Lindbergh argued "if we enter in the quarrels of Europe during war, we must stay in them in time of peace as well." Substitute Middle East for Europe, and the concept is the same. He went on: "If we enter the fighting for democracy abroad we may end by losing it at home;" or, as many argue today, the result at home of war with Iraq will be increased militarization, repression and an end to all individual liberty."

"U.S.: Banned arms evidence in Iraq" (MSNBC, 2003/06/25)
"U.S. investigators in Iraq have found equipment for a nuclear weapons program and millions of detailed documents relating to chemical and biological weapons, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday. ...
Three U.S. officials told NBC's Andrea Mitchell that an Iraqi scientist who was part of what Saddam called his "nuclear mujahadeen" had led intelligence officials to a barrel in the back yard of his home in Baghdad, where they found plans for a gas centrifuge and components of a uranium enrichment system. ...
Sources told NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski that within just the past week, U.S. investigators had found two shipping containers filled with millions of much more recent documents relating to chemical and biological weapons.
One of the documents, from 2001, was titled "Document burial and U.N. activities in Iraq," the sources said. It gave detailed instructions on how to hide materials and deceive U.N. weapons inspectors, the sources said.
Other documents related to the concealment of VX nerve gas, the sources said."

"Document links Saddam, bin Laden" (Gilbert S. Merritt, The Tennessean, 2003/06/25)
"Through an unusual set of circumstances, I have been given documentary evidence of the names and positions of the 600 closest people in Iraq to Saddam Hussein, as well as his ongoing relationship with Osama bin Laden. ...
The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ''responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.''
The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein. ...
That is the story of the ''Honor Roll of 600,'' and why I believe that President Bush was right when he alleged that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama and was coordinating activities with him.
It does not prove that they engaged together in any particular act of terror against the United States.
But it seems to me to be strong proof that the two were in contact and conspiring to perform terrorist acts.
Up until this time, I have been skeptical about these claims. Now I have changed my mind." (Note: Found via InstaPundit.)

"Palestinian officials: Militants offer 3-month truce" (CNN.com, 2003/06/25)
"Palestinian officials said Wednesday that Hamas, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Islamic Jihad have agreed to a three-month suspension of attacks against Israelis, but a Hamas spokesman said no such agreement had been reached. ...
Palestinian officials said the cease-fire specifies that militant groups will halt "all attacks" against Israeli civilians. ...
Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rudeineh said Arafat had given his blessing to the deal and the only thing that remained was for Israel to offer its assurance it would stop targeted killings of radical leaders."

"Jews expelled from Arab countries accuse Arab regimes of ethnic cleansing" (Jenny Hazan and Greer Fay Cashman, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/25)
An article on a report by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) on the "rights and redress of Jewish refugees from Arab States": "Menuchum is one of over 850,000 Jews who have been displaced from Arab countries since 1948, according to the JJAC report which states that 97% of Jews from Arab lands have left their countries of origin, leaving a mere 8,000-member population behind.
"This report presents a damning indictment of the Arab world for the mass violations of human rights and for the coordinated, repressive measures to drive out their Jewish populations or to hold them as political hostages," said Executive Director of JJAC, Stanley Urman, who listed intimidation, beating, persecution, pogroms and the enactment of Nuremberg-type laws among the State-sanctioned tactics perpetrated by the governments of Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, Aden, Syria and Lebanon."

"Iraqis Killed UK Soldiers Over Searches - Residents" (Michael Georgy, Reuters, 2003/06/25)
"Irate Iraqis shot dead six British soldiers and wounded eight others in clashes around this southern Shi'ite town, with animosity fueled by arms searches of residents' homes, local Iraqi witnesses said on Wednesday.
British military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Ronnie McCourt said the killing of the six military police in Majjar on Tuesday was unprovoked, adding: "It was murder." ...
Residents and witnesses said Tuesday's clashes followed days of resentment over efforts to disarm Iraqis, and the shooting erupted after the British forces fired plastic bullets to try to control thousands of protesters.
The witnesses said the Iraqis, believing the British were firing live bullets, fired AK-47 assault rifles, killing the soldiers." (See also: "Eyewitness: Walls riddled with bullets" (Clive Myrie, BBC News, 2003/06/25): "By all accounts the attack on the police station was frenzied. Scores of people armed to the teeth flooded in and the British military policemen taking cover in the desolate building didn't stand a chance. Four of them died in a small room at the station and two more were killed outside in the yard. The British authorities say it was an unprovoked attack by the crowd - cold-blooded murder. The room was then set on fire. Iraqi identity papers lie strewn around the building, some still covered in blood.")

"Access and ethics at the 'Times'" (Andrea Levin, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/25)
"At a Washington symposium in June, New York Times correspondent Douglas Jehl alluded to what is evident in much of his reporting from the region - a striking willingness to accommodate his reporting to such regimes.
He described an anecdote involving Syrian reprisals against a Washington Post reporter who wrote in 1996 that Israel "fired in retaliation" on a Lebanese target, killing 100 people. In covering the same event, Jehl had written that Israel "said" it attacked in response to provocation. For his concession to facts - suggesting that aggression originated with the Arabs - the Post correspondent was denied entry to Syria and, when later admitted, was lectured repeatedly for his misconduct.
The incident left an impression. ...
"Did it make me write more flattering stories? I was conscious that writing a travel story from Syria probably would be a good idea, that quoting the foreign minister at more length than I might otherwise have done was probably a good idea."
And Jehl did write a notoriously fawning and exculpatory "travel" piece on Syria in November 1999."

"Palestinian Reactions to Abu Mazen's Speech at the Aqaba Summit" (MEMRI, Inquiry and Analysis Series - No. 140, 2003/06/25)
"Palestinian Information Minister Nabil Amr said in an interview broadcast on Al-Jazeera: 'Regarding terror [referred to by Abu Mazen in his Aqaba speech]… I don't understand why they think this means resistance. There's no text [in the summit] that says that the resistance of the Palestinian people is terror and that it is denounced. President Yasser Arafat said the same things in Geneva about 15 years ago. That is part of our ideological base. Yes, we denounce terror. But anyone who says that denouncing terror is denouncing the resistance is maligning legitimate resistance and saying it is as despicable as terror. Therefore, the text in Aqaba [was] derived from the PLO's commitment in Geneva, which formed the basis for the Palestinian-American dialogue in Tunis. We know what we are including and [what we are] not including in the text.'"

"Comical Ali 'Held' (No Joke)" (Paul Martin, The Daily Mirror, 2003/06/25)
"Comical Ali, Saddam Hussein's ludicrous spin doctor, has been arrested in Baghdad, it was claimed last night.
Information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf had been hiding out at a relative's house since April watching satellite TV - banned under Saddam.
US troops set up a road block in the Baghdad suburb and caught him in his car on Monday night.
Al-Sahaf - who became a comic hero for his ridiculous denials of the truth in the Gulf War including "We are winning" as Baghdad fell - gave himself up without a fuss.
It was thought he might have killed himself when he disappeared on the day the Iraqi regime collapsed, still insisting Saddam would prevail."

"Pakistani forces hunt for bin Laden" (Bill Sammon, The Washington Times, 2003/06/25)
"Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said yesterday that Osama bin Laden may be in a remote and "treacherous" area of Pakistan that his government's forces are entering for the first time in more than a century.
During a news conference with President Bush to announce $3 billion in proposed U.S. aid to Pakistan, Gen. Musharraf said bin Laden might be crossing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in an area known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
"This is the first time that the Pakistan army and our civil armed forces have entered this region, and we are in the process of opening out this region," he said.
"Now, whether Osama bin Laden is here or across the border, your guess, sir, will be as good as mine," he added. 'But the possibility of his maybe shifting sides on the border is very much there.'"

"IDF arrests 160 West Bank sweep" (Margot Dudkevitch, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/25)
"Soldiers arrested 160 suspected terrorists in a massive sweep of villages and towns in the West Bank on Tuesday. Of the suspects, 130 affiliated with Hamas were arrested in Hebron, among them 20 fugitives.
The Hamas infrastructure in the city is responsible for the killing of 52 civilians in the past year, including the June 11 suicide bombing on a 14A bus in Jerusalem, in which 17 were killed.
On Saturday night, senior Hamas military commander Abdullah Kawasmeh was killed by troops when he attempted to evade arrest. His right hand man Ahmed Bader remains at large. Since the outbreak of violence in September 2000, over 240 Israelis were killed and 1500 wounded in suicide attacks carried out by Hamas, the IDF Spokesman said.
PA officials condemned the operation, and accused Israel of sabotaging attempts by the PA to reach a truce with Hamas. PA cabinet minister Yasser Abed Rabo described Israel's actions as 'total madness.'"

"Townspeople Chased, Killed U.K. Troops" (AP/The Washington Post, 2003/06/25)
"Townspeople furious over civilian deaths during a demonstration in this southern Iraqi town chased down and killed six British military police, local police said Wednesday.
Abbas Faddhel, an Iraqi policeman in the town, said the British troops shot and killed four civilian demonstrators on Tuesday.
Armed civilians then killed two of the British soldiers at the scene of the demonstration - in front of the mayor's office - and then chased four other British soldiers to a police station, killing them after a two-hour gunbattle, Faddhel said. ...
Marchant-Wincott said he could not say whether the British forces had fired at demonstrators but added that they would do so only if their lives were threatened.
Faddhel said that there were about two dozen Iraqi policemen at the station who fled through a window during the gunbattle. Faddhel said they asked the British military police to flee with them but the British insisted on staying.
On Wednesday, the station bore the marks of a large gunbattle, with walls pocked full of bullet holes. Broken glass and dried blood stains covered the floor."

Added in archive:
"The First Casualty" (John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman, The New Republic, 2003/06/19)
"The trail of political Islam" (Gilles Kepel, openDemocracy, 2003/07/03)

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

News and commentary:

"The Occupied Territories of Arab Imagination" (Jacques Tarnero, L'Observatoire du monde juif/Watch, November 2001 [2003/06/24])
A brilliant study on the world view of young Arab immigrants in France, translated and noted by Douglas:
"It would be craven for proponents of the republic to ignore the signs of this other barbarism that only comforts the Front National in its popularity. It would be criminal not to fight against it. A retreat before the Islamic veil is a retreat before Islamist obscurantism. The latest avatars of unreconstructed third-world activism allied with the foolishness of multiculturalism, to which the Council of State has given its blessings, have now given birth to a new Taliban-style model of republican integration. If there were any need, the current horror in Algeria shows that barbarism in the name of God constitutes the other threat to the Republic. One fascism may conceal another." (Note: "The Occupied Territories of Arab Imagination" is also available in a PDF-version. See also the French original: "Les territoires occupés de l’imaginaire beur" (L'Observatoire du monde juif, November 2001))

"Coalition Suffers a Deadly Day as 6 British Soldiers Are Killed" (Kirk Semple, The New York Times, 2003/06/24)
"Six British military personnel in Iraq were killed and eight were wounded today in two separate attacks near the southeastern city of Amara, a spokeswoman for Britain's Ministry of Defense said. The deaths were the first among British troops by hostile fire since April 6.
It was one of the deadliest days for coalition troops since President Bush declared the end of major allied combat operations on May 1.
The six fatalities happened in the same attack, the spokeswoman said, though she offered no further details on the incident.
At least eight other British personnel were injured in a separate firefight about 18 miles south of Amara, a port city on the Tigris River, when a patrol came under enemy attack, the spokeswoman, Maj. Rachel Grimes, said by telephone from the Ministry of Defense in London."

"Killed: Iad Taisir Taher Samodi - Terrorist and Producer of the film 'Jenin Jenin'" (The Command Post, 2003/06/24)
Laurence Simon cites a dispatch from the Israeli Consulate in NYC: "Iad Taisir Taher Samodi was killed on June 23, 2002 in the village Yamon, while trying to resist arrest. Three cell phones, a gun and ammunitions were discovered on his body. Thirty pipe explosives ready to be used for attacks were subsequently found at his house.
Samodi was a policeman for the Palestinian Authority. He was also a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades terror group. His responsibilities within the terrorist organization consisted of supplying weapons to Fatah terrorists in order for them to attack Israelis.
Samodi was the producer of the film "Jenin Jenin" - a movie released last year in which Samodi uses his position as a Palestinian policeman, to describe the suffering of his people and claim that the IDF disregarded the rights of the Palestinian population. Ironically, the movie remains silent about Samodi's activities as a weapons supplier for terror attacks in which innocent Israeli citizens were killed." (See also: Consulate General of Israel in New York.)

"The Oslo Ratchet" (Steven Plaut, Arutz Sheva/Front Page Magazine, 2003/06/24)
"Israeli restraint stirs Arab violence and is a catalyst for Arab nazification. It signals to the Arabs that the Jews are on the run. It signals weakness and destructibility. It does not induce corresponding niceness and reciprocal moderation from the Arabs. It produces extremism and violence. Israeli Arabs were not exactly a bastion of pro-Zionism even before Oslo, but they were by and large pacified, willing to play by the democratic rules, willing to restrict the manifestation of their anti-Jewish sentiments to voting for the communist party, and otherwise maintaining correct and often cordial relations with Jews. Oslo changed all that, producing violent radicalization of Israeli Arabs. Indeed, in the long run, history books may recall this as the very worst destructive damage of all achieved by Shimon Peres and his legions of the Oslo Left."

"Sudan hits out at ship's seizure" (BBC News, 2003/06/24)
"The Sudanese Government has criticised Greece for seizing a ship loaded with explosives which it says were for civilian use.
The Baltic Sky set sail from Tunisia carrying 680 tons of explosives - it was described as a floating atomic bomb, when it was stormed by special forces off Greece's western coast on Sunday.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail said the ship was carrying ammonium nitrates ordered by a Sudanese company and destined for cement factories and road-building firms." (See also: "Greece Links Seized Ship's Explosive Cargo to Sudan" (Brian Williams, Reuters, 2003/06/23))

Monday, June 23, 2003

News and commentary:

"Traveling With Bad Companions" (Martin Peretz, Los Angeles Times, 2003/06/23)
Peretz on the fellow travelers of the Palestinian revolution: "It was the British political historian David Pryce-Jones who, I think, first made the analogy between the old fellow travelers and the new, between those who romanticized the Soviets and those who now romanticize Palestinian (and Islamic) terrorism.
Not that all Palestinians are terrorists, not at all, although polls show an overwhelming proportion of them to be supporters of terrorism. But terrorism happens to be the defining paradigm of the Palestinian cause. Thus it is terrorism that is being supported by the American and British university professors who demand that their institutions divest from companies invested in Israel. And it is terrorism that is being supported by scientists and other academics who propose institutional and personal boycotts of Israeli intellectuals. ...
Palestine will soon have its political expression in statehood. On the night it happens, gunshots will echo throughout the Arab street — to the rest of the world, a peculiar way of celebrating. Still, it will be a celebration. And on the long morrow, there won't be much disenchantment because nothing truly fundamental will have ever been promised or even envisioned.
Dictatorship will settle its rule onto independent Palestine, as it had during the long struggle. Civil strife will follow, and likely another dictatorship will replace the first.
And the borders of Palestine will not be still.
But, by then, the fellow travelers of the Palestinian revolution will be gone, some of them on to other causes, most of them (like the veterans of the 1960s) nursing their heady memories for retelling to their children. Heady memories and lies." (Note: Found via HonestReporting.)

"Official PA Website Claims Terrorists Killed by IDF When In Truth They Blew Selves Up" (Aaron Lerner, IMRA, 2003/06/23)
Warped headlines are bad enough, but the official Palestine Media Center doesn't even bother to spin the story - they just write a completely new version of it: "Despite international condemnation of Israel's assassination policy, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) assassinated four Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun, less than 48 hours after an IOF undercover unit extra-judicially killed a top Hamas activist in the southern West Bank city of Hebron.
The killing of the four activists came few hours after IOF shot dead a Palestinian woman in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, Palestinian medical and security sources said.
Palestine security sources and witnesses said that an Israeli tank opened fire at a house in the re-occupied town of Beit Hanoun, killing four Palestinians and wounding three others." (See also: "Four Palestinians Extra-judicially Killed by IOF" (Palestine Media Center, 2003/06/23) and "Renewed Violence Kills Four Palestinians" (Ibrahim Barzak, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/06/23))

"Greece Links Seized Ship's Explosive Cargo to Sudan" (Brian Williams, Reuters, 2003/06/23)
"Greece said on Monday a seized ship carrying an "atomic bomb"-sized quantity of explosives was destined for a company with a post office box in Khartoum, Sudan, that did not exist.
Casting doubts on the legality of the ship's activities, Greek Shipping Minister George Anomeritis said the vessel did not report its 680-toncargo of dynamite when the coast guard stopped it.
"It was sailing in Greek waters and when the coast guard authorities stopped it, it did not report its cargo," he told a news conference.
Police said earlier the ship was carrying ammonia dynamite, an explosive widely used in mining, as well as 8,000 detonators and fuses. ...
He said the Baltic Sky left Albania on April 27, stopped at Gabes in Tunisia on May 12 where the explosives were loaded, showed up in Istanbul on May 22 and was sighted in waters off northern Turkey on June 2." (See also: "Greek Forces Find 680 Metric Tons of Explosives on Ship" (Reuters, 2003/06/22))

"Hearing Both Sides of Title VI" (Stanley Kurtz, National Review, 2003/06/23)
An interesting report from a Congress hearing, convened to examine charges of bias leveled against Middle East Studies:
"So here's an image that will give you a sense of what the political-intellectual range of debate in academic area studies is really like.
Imagine Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Howard Dean, and John Kerry gathered together in a room for a daily debate on American foreign policy. Now imagine that once every week or ten days, Condoleezza Rice shows up and joins the debate for a day. That's about the range of intellectual-political debate in today's area-studies community. Of course there's enough of a range within this little group of four to make for a good deal of disagreement. Ultimately, though, it's a bogus debate, because it includes only half the intellectual-political spectrum (except for those brief weekly visits by Condoleezza). This is an all too accurate metaphor for the state of political debate in today's academy." (See also: "Congress Probes Middle Eastern Studies" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2003/06/23): "Since 9/11, higher education lobbyists like Hartle have been pushing for more Title VI funding, citing the threats emanating from the Middle East. The paradox is that the very Middle East "experts" who have been getting Title VI money for decades have been anything but prescient about changes in the Middle East. Even worse, a lot of them subscribe to Edward Said's notion that the proper role of American scholars is to agitate against the alleged excesses of American neo-imperialism, both in the classroom and outside of it. The most brazen abusers have done this on the government's nickle.")

"Taking Sides" (Saul Singer, National Review, 2003/06/23)
Singer on misplaced neutrality when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians: "Everyone knows that if you want less aggression, you should deter it rather than reward it. But is less widely recognized that misplaced neutrality violates this cardinal rule. It therefore does not advance peace efforts; it cripples them.
The notion of an honest broker needs to be refined. When Israel and the Palestinians were at Camp David, an honest broker was needed to craft an agreement that met the needs, if not all the dreams, of both parties. But when one side refused to negotiate, turned over the table, and (a few months later) started shooting, being honest required crying foul.
For all the progress that has been made since then, the U.S. still has not fully done that. Crying foul does not just mean condemning terrorism, it means acting in a temporarily lopsided way, putting full blame on the aggressor, and fully backing the victim's efforts to fight back. When fighting is going on the instinct to be neutral must be turned on its head: The more the blame is focused, rather than shared, the sooner aggression will become counterproductive, the sooner it will stop, and the sooner negotiations can begin."

"The Empire Strikes Back" (Anatol Lieven, The Nation, from the 2003/07/07 issue)
150 years later, Marxists are still eagerly awaiting and continually proclaiming the promised downfall of capitalism because of its "inherent contradictions". Lieven's review of six books on the American Empire is a telling example of the "revival of premonitory scenarios of gloom": "It is interesting in the light of all this to revisit the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. The title of his new book, The Decline of American Power, appears curious at first sight. So regularly has Wallerstein predicted the decline of American power over the decades, and so steeply has American power in fact risen, that he has often appeared as the boy who cried wolf. But then, in the fable, the wolf, of course, eventually turned out to be all too real, just a bit late. ...
For just as US imperialism, emboldened by a strong shot of nationalism, is busy undermining the world political order of which the United States is hegemon, so dominant sections of the US capitalist elite are suicidally gobbling up the fiscal foundations of American economic stability and the American capitalist system. ... In their criminal arrogance, these contemporary American projects and attitudes are much more reminiscent of Wilhelmine Germany, and we must hope that they do not receive a condign punishment. For in the words of Arnold Toynbee, 'great empires do not die by murder, but suicide.'" (See also: "We, The Maya" (John J. Miller, The Corner, 2003/06/22))

"The New Gloomsayers" (Joshue Muravchik, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/06/23)
Muravchik on the return of the declinists: "Their thesis was that "imperial overstretch," a term coined by the historian Paul Kennedy, was causing the U.S. to spend too much on defense, thus sending the nation into an economic downturn that would eviscerate the very basis of its strength. A similar theme could be heard among the heralds of a new era of Japanese supremacy, brought about by the readiness of Japan's government to intervene in the marketplace. "Japan has, as I predicted it would, become the undisputed world economic champion," boasted the economist Clyde Prestowitz in 1989. William Pfaff, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, chimed in that America's relationship with Japan had taken on a "colonial quality" - with America in the role of colony.
The forecasts of American decline or Japanese ascendance did not stand the test of even a very brief amount of time. Soon, the Soviet empire collapsed, followed by the Soviet Union itself, allowing, in no small measure, to Ronald Reagan's military expenditures and his "overstretched" foreign policy - that is, to the very things that the declinists had decried. Japan, meanwhile, fell into an economic tailspin from which it still, after more than a decade, shows few signs of escaping, while the U.S. economy grew enough to boost per capita income by more than 25%, widening the margin by which our prosperity outstrips that of the other industrialized countries. ...
Abroad, this astounding run of success has generated a discernible uptick in expressions of envy. At home, one reaction has been a revival of premonitory scenarios of gloom."

"Iran: Back the Freedom Fighters" (Michael Ledeen, The Washington Post, 2003/06/23)
"Support for democratic revolution comes naturally to Americans, and we all thrill at the spectacle of brave people challenging corrupt tyrants in the name of freedom. Yet a surprising number of commentators and policymakers are fighting against the prospect of open American support for the Iranian revolutionaries. Their most recent argument is that open approval and, worse still, modest material support from the United States would somehow tarnish the purity of the Iranian uprising and even prove counterproductive.
This sort of argument is not new; we have heard it whenever we have had a president brave enough to speak the truth to tyranny. We were told that it would be counterproductive to denounce the gulag system and support the Soviet dissidents, that the Jackson-Vanik law (linking trade with the Soviet Union to freedom to emigrate for Soviet Jews) would be counterproductive, and that we must at all costs refrain from calling for greater human rights in the People's Republic of China. Yet every time another tyrant falls, his surviving victims invariably tell us that our words of support gave hope and strength to the freedom fighters and weakened the resolve of their oppressors. Bukovsky, Sharansky, Ginsburg, Walesa and Havel know the power of American support, as do Gorbachev, Jaruzelski, Milosevic and Marcos.
Crafty silence is simply another way to appease tyranny, and a tactical retreat in our life-and-death war against the terror masters."

"Islamist, Marxist, Terrorist" (Amir Taheri, The Wall Street Journal/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/06/23)
Taheri on the Iranian Mujahedin Khalq and France: "During Iran's 1978-79 turmoil the MEK played an active role in helping Khomeini to power. Its squads burned cinemas, restaurants, hotels and bookshops, and murdered policemen. After Khomeini seized the reins, it did all it could to radicalize the regime, supporting the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Yet within a year the MEK - now led by Rajavi, who had come out of prison during the revolution - decided that the Khomeinist regime was not revolutionary. It had to be toppled; so there ensued a terrorist operation against the regime, that still continues.
Support for the MEK remained a bipartisan policy of France until this week. In 1987, Jacques Chirac, then prime minister, signed an accord with the MEK granting them protection in exchange for a promise not to kill Iranian officials on French soil. Over the years the MEK organized an asylum seekers' racket - 40,000 Iranians to Europe on bogus claims and in exchange for "voluntary contributions" of up to $10,000 each. Now a personality cult built around blind devotion to Rajavi, it has recruited its adepts mainly from relatives of people executed by the Khomeinist regime. Individuals are brainwashed, and not allowed to develop normal relationships outside the organization. They refuse to send their children to school, insisting that they be educated at home."

"The Poisonous Return of Anti-Semitism" (Fraser Nelson, The Scotsman/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/06/23)
"Last month, the largest anti-Jewish attack on Britain since the Second World War was visited on a cemetery in east London. The photographers found a staggering scene: some 390 graves desecrated.
The picture did not make the news; few Fleet Street titles covered the story at all. In the grand scheme of things, it was treated as a local act of vandalism which had few wider implications.
This was not a one-off attack. It was part of a series which has sent the number of such incidents in London soaring by 75 percent during the first three months of this year alone. Even now, few are willing to name this poison. Anti-Semitism is back. ...
When politicians start playing name-the-Jew, anti-Semitism will not be far behind. When anti-Americans and anti-capitalists loosely include certain Jews in their demonology, by dint of their religion, this will rub off on protesters - who have never looked too closely at the facts.
History has taught what happens when anti-Semitism is given the slightest breathing space. As the conspiracy theories over the war continue to proliferate, the idea of blaming Jews deserves to be called by its name."

"Renewed Violence Kills Four Palestinians" (Ibrahim Barzak, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/06/23)
Note the convoluted and abstract headline, which in effect victimizes the terrorists while portraying them as ordinary "Palestinians". This is typical for media reports on the Middle East conflict. In fact, the absurdly abstract headline would certainly not have been used for events in any other conflict in any other country in the world. But, then, only in the Middle East conflict can the killing of a terrorist leader be widely condemned as an "impediment to peace":
"Four Palestinian militants were killed when a bomb they were planting went off in northern Gaza, and Israel's prime minister indicated that Israel will keep targeting militants for death despite international peace efforts.
At first, Palestinian security officials said Israeli tanks fired shells late Sunday at a group of militants from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, affiliated with the mainstream Fatah, killing three men and wounding four others in the town of Beit Hanoun. Another died later in a hospital, doctors said.
However, later loudspeaker trucks drove through the area saying that the four died while "fulfilling their national duty," a phrase used in the past to announce accidental deaths. Israeli military sources said on condition of anonymity that the militants were on their way to plant a bomb and it went off prematurely." (See also: "Sharon defends Kawasmeh killing as 'vital'" (Herb Keinon, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/23): "While world leaders roundly condemned Saturday's killing of Hamas military leader Abdullah Kawasmeh in Hebron, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon praised the operation. ... Kawasmeh, who was at the top of the "most wanted" list for the West Bank, is accused of having masterminded four attacks in which 52 people were killed. Security officials say he was killed while resisting arrest.")

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

Copyright © Watch 2001-2006.
Copyrights of quoted materials belong to their respective owners.

"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

› AOTW Archive



From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

Weekly archive

2006/12/04 - 2006/12/10
2006/11/27 - 2006/12/03
2006/11/20 - 2006/11/26
2006/11/13 - 2006/11/19
2006/11/06 - 2006/11/12
2006/10/30 - 2006/11/05

› From 2001/09/11 -



Monthly index

December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006

› From September 2001 -



Author index

› Ajami, Fouad - Johnson, Paul
› Kagan, Robert - Ye'or, Bat



Support Watch

Please feel free to donate if you enjoy the daily content and links Watch provides:

Contact Watch

Email:
watch-at-windsofchange.net