Author: jameswagner

Oh, yuck.
The White House sends Sharon to Miami to help two Bushes. That’s certainly what it looks like, but the move might just backfire.

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, will appear in South Florida with Gov. Jeb Bush on Sept. 9 — the day before Mr. Bush’s would-be challengers meet in the Democratic primary — at a pro-Israel rally where international affairs will share a stage with domestic political concerns.
Israeli consular officials in Miami said today that Mr. Sharon’s appearance had nothing to do with the re-election campaign of President Bush’s brother. But Florida Democratic leaders denounced the appearance as the latest instance of what they described as White House intervention on behalf of Governor Bush’s campaign. They argued that the visit would help the governor this November and enhance the prime minister’s standing with the White House at a time when the administration is torn by conflicting demands from Israeli and Arab leaders.

Now we really do have a reason to go to war. Coca Cola is being attacked by arabs abroad. And the source of the terrorism? Iran, one of the members of the “axis of evil.” One problem. The enemy is actually all of our allies in the Middle East. How does that happen?

An Iranian soft drink named after a holy spring in Mecca is said to have won an enthusiastic reception in Saudi Arabia.
Zamzam Cola, an alternative to US brands Coca Cola and Pepsi, has gone on sale at the same time as a campaign to boycott American goods gathers momentum.

A problematic name, but the website is a worthy enterprise nevertheless.

Definition
A chickenhawk is a term often applied to public persons – generally male – who (1) tend to advocate, or are fervent supporters of those who advocate, military solutions to political problems, and who have personally (2) declined to take advantage of a significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime.
Some individuals may qualify more for their political associations than for any demonstrated personal tendency towards bellicosity. Some women may be included for exceptional bellicosity.
There is another, less savory definition of the term chickenhawk. It is not relevant to this discussion; we intend no such associations to be drawn here.
This list is provisonal. The management of the Gazette is proud to have served the vital public function of assembling the best known list of American chickenhawks, but we confess – we declare and emphasize – that we have not the resources to tend to it properly. Therefore we declare it provisional: we acknowledge there may be faults – hell, we know there are.

The site has garnered kudos all the way across the pond.

The US is now mainly governed by men in their mid-50s, ie the Vietnam generation – except that this lot missed being the Vietnam generation. [They ducked service.] The enterprisingly original New Hampshire Gazette (www.nhgazette.com) maintains a “Chickenhawks” database to tell their stories. Most of the allegations fit with facts recorded elsewhere.

On to Baghdad, son!

[This is a report of Donald’s latest communication from Steve in Palestine, written this morning in New York.]

In the last report, I mentioned that the army was occupying a large
house in Nablus, with the original 20 occupants confined to a single
apartment. Outside this house were two Palestinian trucks that the
army had impounded. The army had taken one of the driver’s ID
papers. Internationals were advocating for the trucks and the ID to
be released.
I spoke with Steve this morning 8/20 around 7 am New York Time. He
was in the Askar refugee camp outside Nablus.
He had stayed for a long time with other members of JATO outside the
abovementioned house, advocating for the truck drivers, while JATO
members also brought food and medicine for the people in the house.
The area was under curfew, but the presence of so many internationals
encouraged other neighbors to come out of their homes. They brought
food for the JATO folks. This ticked off the army, and soldiers
ordered all Palestinians out of the area, including a representative
from the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees. The
soldiers did not order the internationals out of the area. Steve
left at that time.
Over the time they stayed in front of the house, JATO people
witnessed blindfolded prisoners brought to the house. One of them
was obviously beaten up.
Late at night, about 25 soldiers left the house in various armored
vehicles, as Steve put it “to go out capturing and murdering”. When
the soldiers came back around 3 am, they had something in writing
identifying the area outside the house as a “military area” and told
the internationals to beat it.
The truck driver whose ID was taken eventually got it back, as well
as his truck. The other truck driver still hasn’t gotten his truck
back. This truck is filled with vegetables, which will rot, and
Nablus is full of people who are hungry.
Steve was in Nablus today for a meeting, and heard gunfire as
soldiers deployed in the Kasbah.
ISM is working to put together some strategy around dealing with
occupied homes. Right now everything they are doing at occupied
homes is ad hoc.
Steve says he has heard about an apartment building in a nearby
village where several apartments are occupied by the army, and the
other residents of the building are locked into their apartments.
They have to pound on their own doors for up to two hours to get food
or medicine (like in prison).
I forgot to ask Steve if occupying homes was common throughout the
West Bank, or was a practice isolated to Nablus.
Steve says that it serves no purpose except to harass Palestinians
and make life difficult for them. Nablus is completely encircled by
the army, and they could run their operations from their camps, but
choose to take over homes because it is more intimidating and
offensive. Paraphrasing a remark made by Moshe Dayan regarding
harassment of Palestinians 30 years ago “Let them live like dogs.
They can leave if they don’t like it”
End of report
dsg

And is this the kind of democratic dialogue we could expect from the nice Iraqi opposition groups the Whitehouse is courting?

BERLIN (Reuters) – German police said Tuesday two people had been injured and shots fired as four or five members of an obscure Iraqi opposition group occupied the Iraqi embassy in Berlin, taking hostages.
“Iraqi opposition members tried to force their way into the embassy and then there were shots from the embassy,” a police spokesman told Reuters by telephone.
Another police spokesman at the scene said two people had been injured and said that the number of hostages taken at the embassy was believed to be less than 10, but among those held was thought to be the Iraqi ambassador.
The spokesman said police did not have any more information about the identity of the opposition group. He said German special forces had been informed about the incident.
A group calling itself the Democratic Iraqi Opposition of Germany issued a statement earlier in German saying it was launching a “peaceful and temporary” action to press its demands for an end to the rule of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

On a much lighter note, check out the hot German special forces guy pictured in the NYTimes story. Jeans and t-shirt–don’t they need armor to be brave?

And this is from Reuters, not the alternative media!

President Bush used to call him “the evil one” but in recent months Osama bin Laden has become the unmentionable one, replaced by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as the chief enemy of the United States.
….
“They didn’t find him, they don’t know where he is and it’s not in the administration’s interest to keep reminding the American people of that,” said Michael Sherry, a historian at Northwestern University in Chicago.
“Every time bin Laden is mentioned, it’s a reminder that they don’t have a clue and it’s a reminder of their failure to fulfill their own stated war aims and it’s a reminder that the war on terrorism has become directionless and not very effective,” Sherry said.
….
The problem for Bush is, without an invasion of Iraq, there is no clear next step in a global war on terrorism, which Bush declared after Sept. 11 would be the defining mission for his generation for the foreseeable future.
“With no Osama bin Laden and no Saddam Hussein, the war on terrorism becomes a metaphorical abstraction, like the war on poverty,” said Keith Shimko, a political scientist at Purdue University in Indiana.
“Clearly we ought to be rebuilding Afghanistan and securing its future. But we as a people have a short attention span and it’s hard to keep a focus on nondramatic things that cost money and don’t provide the immediate satisfaction you get from blowing things up,” he said.

Edward Said has written a powerful, profoundly moving account of the present horror of the Israeli/Palestinian death dance. It’s not especially brief, but it carries the reader breathlessly along its argument. The pain is not in the read, but in the message.

Israel is frequently referred to as a democracy. If so, then it is a democracy without a conscience, a country whose soul has been captured by a mania for punishing the weak, a democracy that faithfully mirrors the psychopathic mentality of its ruler, General Sharon, whose sole idea — if that is the right word for it — is to kill, reduce, maim, drive away Palestinians until “they break”. He provides nothing more concrete as a goal for his campaigns, now or in the past, beyond that, and like the garrulous official in Kafka’s story he is most proud of his machine for abusing defenceless Palestinian civilians, all the while monstrously abetted in his grotesque lies by his court advisers and philosophers and generals, as well as by his chorus of faithful American servants. There is no Palestinian army of occupation, no Palestinian tanks, no soldiers, no helicopter gun-ships, no artillery, no government to speak of. But there are the “terrorists” and the “violence” that Israel has invented so that its own neuroses can be inscribed on the bodies of Palestinians, without effective protest from the overwhelming majority of Israel’s laggard philosophers, intellectuals, artists, peace activists. Palestinian schools, libraries and universities have ceased normal functioning for months now: and we still wait for the Western freedom-to-write-groups and the vociferous defenders of academic freedom in America to raise their voices in protest. I have yet to see one academic organisation either in Israel or in the West make a declaration about this profound abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to learning, to attend school.

[again, a report from Steve, still in Palestine, relayed through Donald]

Steve and company walked through the checkpoint outside nablus no
problem.
ISM people are doing a checkpoint watch to advocate for people not
allowed through. Steve stayed there a couple hours and helped get
people through, including sick people. He witnessed an entire family
get turned away, luggage and all. They were trying to get back home
to Jordan.
Steve went to Balata refugee camp. He says it is “carnivalesque”.
Even during curfew it is packed with people, vendors hawking. There
are 30,000 people in the camp. Packed.
Internationals have a definite role to play in stopping the
demolition of Palestinian homes. Steve and others from his group
spent the night in Askar refugee camp, outside Nablus, with 4
different families of people shot by the Israeli military.
Meanwhile, in the old city of Nablus, a home was demolished that was
not housing an international.
The demolitions are usually done around 2 in the morning.
Today Steve watched a tank go down a street in Nablus shooting at
rock throwing kids. His group visited a house in Nablus. It’s a
big, beautiful house, and it has a great view of the city, so it has
been taken by the Israeli military. The twenty Palestinians who
lived there have been shoved into a single apartment. confined to one
apartment. Folks from JATO brought medicine and food to those people,
Outside the building there are two trucks being held for driving
during curfew. One of the trucks is full of food which will rot.
Steve and his group hope to persuade military officers to release the
truck (they also have one of the driver’s ID papers, which means he
can’t go anywhere until he gets them back).
That’s all for now.
Dsg

I’m including below additional information about what people might do to help make a diffference.
[this was a postscript on today’s message from Donald, so I’m not sure who wrote it]

Ps In the last post I mentioned ISM organizing support for the Olive
Harvest. You can get lots of information on this action at
www.palsolidarity.org

[these items are from Steve]

To phone me in Palestine from the United States, dial 011-972-67-308192. I’ll be delighted to hear from you. (Palestine is 7 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time.)
You’re welcome to share my phone number in Palestine with anyone you like. You may also forward this email to anyone you like; just erase the originating email address from the header.
I prefer not to receive email while I’m away.
For information on New York area organizing for direct action in Palestine (or to make a donation), go to www.directactionpalestine.com.
For the extremely informative website of New York’s Jews Against the Occupation, the group with which I’m most active, go to www.jewsagainsttheoccupation.org.
For up-to-date, first-hand, news from Palestine, go to Indymedia Palestine at http//:jerusalem.indymedia.org.
For diaries and photos from the last delegation, and lots of other excellent information, see www.ccmep.org. For diaries from an activist currently in Palestine, go to http://georgie.ripserve.com. For general info on the International Solidarity Movement, see www.palsolidarity.org.