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>Envelope-to: Bruce.Taylor@hedb.uib.no
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>From: MER <MERL@MiddleEast.Org>
>To: "MER" <MERL@MiddleEast.Org>
>Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 20:47:03 +0000
>Subject: LIES, HATRED and FORCE
>Reply-To: MER@MiddleEast.Org
>Organization: MiD-EasT RealitieS
>
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> / |/ / /___/ / /_ // M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S
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>/_/ /_/ /___/ /_/ \\ http://www.MiddleEast.Org
>
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> and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know!
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>
> LIES, HATRED AND THE LANGUAGE OF FORCE
>
> Arab View
>
> By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent
>
> The Independent, London, 13 October 2000:
> This is a story about lies, bias, hatred and death. It's about our
> inability after more than half a century to understand the
> injustice of the Middle East. It's about a part of the world where
> it seems quite natural, after repeatedly watching on television
> the funeral of 11-year-old Sami Abu Jezar who died two days
> after being shot through the forehead by Israeli soldiers for a
> crowd to kick two Israeli plainclothes agents to death. It's
> about a nation that claims "purity of arms" but fires missiles at
> civilian apartment blocks and then claims it is "restoring
> order". It's about people who are so enraged by the killing of
> almost a hundred Palestinians that they try to blow up an
> entire American warship.
>
> It's as simple as that. When I walked into the local photocopy
> shop yesterday afternoon, the boys there greeted me with
> ecstatic smiles. "Did you hear that an American ship has been
> attacked?" one of them asked. "There are Americans dead."
> All I saw around the room were smiles. In a corner, on a small
> television screen, an Israeli Apache aircraft was firing a
> missile at Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Gaza.
>
> Seven years ago, CNN showed us the Israeli prime minister
> shaking Yasser Arafat by the hand, live on the White House
> lawn. Now, live from Gaza, we watch a pilot carrying out an
> order from the Israeli prime minister to kill Arafat by bombing
> his headquarters.
>
> As usual last night, the television news broadcasts those
> most obsequious and deforming of information dispensers
> were diverting our minds from the truth. They did not ask why
> the Palestinians should have lynched two Israeli undercover
> men. Instead, they asked why Palestinian police had not
> protected them. They did not ask why a suicide bomber in a
> rubber boat should have bombed the USS Cole.
>
> Instead, they asked who he was, who he worked for, and they
> interviewed Pentagon officials who denounced "terrorism".
> Always the "who" or the "what"; never the "why".
>
> It is of course possible that Osama bin Laden, one of the
> more recent American hate figures, could have inspired by
> sermons rather than direct instruction the attack on the USS
> Cole. Bin Laden's family originally came from Yemen. And it
> was Yemen that demanded the right earlier this week to fly
> arms direct to the Palestinians of the occupied territories
> provoked, it seems, by slow-motion footage of yet another boy,
> a 12-year-old, dying on top of his father in Gaza after being
> shot by the Israelis. Yet many of the attacks on Israeli
> occupation forces in Lebanon were carried out by young men,
> unconnected with the corrupt Arab political ιlite but enraged
> by the injustice of their lot. Maybe it was the same in Yemen.
>
> When Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo agreement seven years
> ago, only a very few asked how soon this raddled, flawed,
> hopeless "peace" would collapse. I thought it would end in
> violence because the Palestinians were being forced by
> Americans and Israelis to sign a peace that would give them
> neither a state nor an end to Jewish settlements on Arab land,
> nor a capital in Arab east Jerusalem.
>
> I wrote that Arafat had been turned from "super-terrorist" into a
> "super-statesman" but could easily be turned into a
> "super-terrorist" again. And so it came to pass. Yesterday, the
> Israeli spokesman Avi Pasner shared a BBC interview with
> me and called Arafat a "terrorist".
>
> Alas, none of it was surprising none save our continued
> inability to grasp what happens when a whole society is
> pressure-cooked to the point of explosion. A Pentagon official
> was saying last night the US government was trying to find out
> if the attack on the USS Cole was "related" to "violence" in the
> Middle East. Come again? Related? Violence? Who can
> doubt that the attempt to sink the Cole and all her 360
> American crew was directed at a nation now held responsible
> for Israel's killing of scores of Palestinian civilians? The
> United States despite all the claptrap from Madeleine
> Albright about "honest brokers" is Israel's ally.
>
> Ever since Arafat tried to leave the US ambassador's
> residence in Paris two weeks ago, the Palestinians have
> placed this responsibility on America's shoulders. If the US
> wants to go on supporting an ally that shoots down
> Palestinians in the streets of the occupied territories, then the
> United States will be held to account. And will pay for it.
>
> No, of course this does not excuse the bloodthirsty killing of
> armed Israeli agents or the desecration of the Tomb of
> Joseph in Nablus, or, indeed, the murder of Jewish settlers.
> But the cruelty of the Palestinians can be explained by the
> cruelty of the Israelis. The death toll among Palestinians now
> is almost exactly equal to that at Qana in 1996 when Israeli
> gunners butchered 106 Lebanese civilians. We called it a
> massacre. The Israelis said it was a mistake. True, it's
> scarcely 5 per cent of the death toll at the Sabra and Chatila
> refugee camps, when Israel's militia allies killed up to 2,000
> Palestinian civilians. We called that a massacre. Israel said
> this, too, was a mistake. Like they called the death of two
> 12-year-old children and a seven-year-old child and Sami Abu
> Jezar a mistake.
>
> And yesterday with no institutional memory to guide them
> journalists were taking at face value Israel's extraordinary
> claim that they fired "only at military targets", that the civilian
> population of Gaza had been "told to evacuate" the areas to be
> bombed. Do I not seem to remember how the Israelis said in
> 1982 that in Lebanon they "only fired at military targets" and
> left more than 17,000 civilians dead in two months? Do I not
> recall that the Israelis ordered the villagers of Mansouri to
> "evacuate" before they shelled it in 1996, then attacked their
> cars on the road and fired a missile into the back of an
> ambulance, killing four children and three women the
> missile made, of course, by the Boeing company of America?
>
> And was not the CIA supposed to be training the Palestinian
> policemen now being derided by Mr Pasner as "terrorists" (his
> own country having personally vetted which of them should
> carry arms)? And was not the United States the guarantor and
> broker of the disastrous Oslo agreement? So is it really
> surprising that the Palestinians indeed, the Arabs blame
> the United States for the tragedy unfolding in the Holy Land?
>
> And is it any less surprising that the Israelis have now turned
> on the man w ith whom they thought they would conclude a
> peace that would turn "Palestine" into a Bantustan? The man
> who was supposed to "control" the Palestinians, who was
> supposed to lock up opponents of the "peace process"
> whether they be peaceful or violent is not doing what he was
> told. He walked out of Camp David because it was a
> surrender too far. So President Clinton blamed him for the
> conference's failure on Israeli television, of all places and
> ordered Arafat not to declare a state. Or else.
>
> And now, when two US presidential contenders Messrs
> Bush and Gore try to out-do each other in their love and
> loyalty for Israel, can America comprehend what is
> happening?
>
> I suppose it's the same old story. The Israelis only want
> peace. The unruly, riotous, murderous Palestinians totally to
> blame for 95 of their own deaths understand only violence.
>
> That's what Israel's military spokesman said last night. Force,
> he said, "will be the only language they understand". Which is
> about as near to a declaration of war as you can get.
>
>
>
>
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-- Bruce Taylor Bruce.Taylor@hedb.uib.no HF fakultetets EDB-seksjon Computing Section, Faculty of the Arts Universitetet i Bergen N-5007 Bergen NORWAY
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