| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Guest-1441 | | Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2003 8:55 pm Post subject: |
| We don't care that Saddam is killing his people for a political agenda.
We don't care that Saddam has gassed his people and hasn't shown that the gas is gone.
We don't care Saddam pays bounties to murderers outside his country.
We don't care if Saddam still wants Kuwait.
We don't care that Saddam is in material violation of UNSC Article 7 Resolutions that call for "serious consequences".
We have oil contracts there. We have investments there. Saddam owes us money.
And our domestic markets are just too Arab to be getting them irritated.
What do you mean by "Pacifism for profit kills"?
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NO MORE PACIFISM FOR PROFIT! | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Guest-400c | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 5:30 am Post subject: |
| Pacifism for profit.
After Saddam kills 2,000,000 Iraqis, and pays blood money to Palestinian terrorists.
Pathetic | | | | Guest-98a3 | | Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 7:45 am Post subject: Israel Firsters of the JINSA cabal are Sick (and Traitorous) |
| | Cowboy wrote: | Pacifism for profit.
After Saddam kills 2,000,000 Iraqis, and pays blood money to Palestinian terrorists.
Pathetic |
Nice try by this Zionist to distort the truth.. For a reality check, the sanctions (imposed by Israel via its client state of USA at the UN) killed all those Iraqi (which were "acceptable" losses to Jewish Secretary of State Albright).
Saddam Hussein has provided funding to the Palestinian resistance against the brutal Israeli occupation of Arab (Palestinian) land which has been in violation of UN Security Council Resolution for years... The UN/US double standard for the rogue state of Israel is sick.. Looking the other way on the Israeli treachery (of the USS Liberty attack in which 34 American sailors murdered by Israel with 171 wounded) is sick (and is traitorous as well):
http://www.ussliberty.org | | | | Guest-98a3 | | Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 7:47 am Post subject: A monument to hypocrisy |
| A monument to hypocrisy
Every one of us must raise our voices, and march in protest, now and
again and again, writes Edward Said
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/625/op2.htm
It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this
country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf
through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every
evening, just to find out what "the country" is thinking and planning,
but patience and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech,
designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN
into going to war, seems to me to have been a new low point in moral
hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in
Munich this past weekend went one step further than the bumbling Powell
in unctuous sermonizing and bullying derision. For the moment, I shall
discount George Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and
political managers like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove:
they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive
monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I believe is
also an Israeli citizen). Bush is, he has said, in direct contact with
God, or if not God, then at least Providence. Perhaps only Israeli
settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state and defence
seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women and men, so
it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over their words
and activities.
First, a few preliminaries. The US has clearly decided on war: there
seem to be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take
place or not (given all the activity started, not by the Arab states
who, as usual, seem to dither and be paralysed at the same time, but by
France, Russia and Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless to
have transported 200,000 troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar,
leaving aside smaller deployments in Jordan, Turkey and Israel can mean
only one thing.
Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said,
are chicken hawks, that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any
fighting themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney and others of that
entirely civilian group were to a man in strong favour of the Vietnam
War, yet each of them got a deferment based on privilege, and therefore
never fought or so much as even served in the armed forces. Their
belligerence is therefore morally repugnant and, in the literal sense,
anti-democratic in the extreme. What this unrepresentative cabal seeks
in a war with Iraq has nothing to do with actual military
considerations. Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities of its
deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent and credible threat to
neighbours like Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan (each of which could
easily handle it militarily) or certainly to the US. Any argument to the
contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition. With
a few outdated Scuds, and a small amount of chemical and biological
material, most of it supplied by the US in earlier days (as Nader has
said, we know that because we have the receipts for what was sold to
Iraq by US companies), Iraq is, and has easily been, containable, though
at unconscionable cost to the long-suffering civilian population. For
this terrible state of affairs I think it is absolutely true to say that
there has been collusion between the Iraqi regime and the Western
enforcers of the sanctions.
Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change --a process
already begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzs of this country --there is
simply no end in sight. Isn't it outrageous that people of such a
dubious caliber actually go on blathering about bringing democracy,
modernisation, and liberalisation to the Middle East? God knows that the
area needs it, as so many Arab and Muslim intellectuals and ordinary
people have said over and over. But who appointed these characters as
agents of progress anyway? And what entitles them to pontificate in so
shameless a way when there are already so many injustices and abuses in
their own country to be remedied? It's particularly galling that Perle,
about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be on any subject
touching on democracy and justice, should have been an election adviser
to Netanyahu's extreme right-wing government during the period 1996-9,
in which he counseled the renegade Israeli to scrap any and all peace
attempts, to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and try to get rid of as many
Palestinians as possible. This man now talks about bringing democracy to
the Middle East, and does so without provoking the slightest objection
from any of the media pundits who politely (abjectly) quiz him on
national television.
Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite its many weaknesses, its
plagiarised and manufactured evidence, its confected audio-tapes and its
doctored pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein's regime has
violated numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can be no
arguing with that and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so
monumentally hypocritical about the official US position is that
literally everything Powell has accused the Ba'athists of has been the
stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948, and at no time
more flagrantly than since the occupation of 1967. Torture, illegal
detention, assassination, assaults against civilians with missiles,
helicopters and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation of
civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment,
mass killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatilla to mention only the
most obvious), denial of rights to free passage and unimpeded civilian
movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians as human shields,
humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a mass scale,
destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal
settlement, economic pauperisation, attacks on hospitals, medical
workers and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to name only the most
outrageous abuses: all these, it should be noted with emphasis, have
been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the United
States which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such
practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but also has
given the country upwards of $135 billion in economic aid on a scale
that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by the US government
on its own citizens.
This is an unconscionable record to hold against the US, and Mr Powell
as its human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of US foreign
policy, it is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of this
country, and to make sure that the enforcement of human rights and the
promotion of freedom --the proclaimed central plank in the US's foreign
policy since at least 1976 --is applied uniformly, without exception or
condition. How he and his bosses and co-workers can stand up before the
world and righteously sermonise against Iraq while at the same time
completely ignoring the ongoing American partnership in human rights
abuses with Israel defies credibility. And yet no one, in all the
justified critiques of the US position that have appeared since Powell
made his great UN speech, has focused on this point, not even the
ever-so-upright French and Germans. The Palestinian territories today
are witnessing the onset of a mass famine; there is a health crisis of
catastrophic proportions; there is a civilian death toll that totals at
least a dozen to 20 people a week; the economy has collapsed; hundreds
of thousands of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, or move
about as curfews and at least 300 barricades impede their daily lives;
houses are blown up or bulldozed on a mass basis (60 yesterday). And all
of it with US equipment, US political support, US finances. Bush
declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard, is a man of
peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinians' lives that have been
lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal army. And he has the gall to
say that he acts in God's name, and that he (and his administration) act
to serve "a just and faithful God". And, more astounding yet, he
lectures the world on Saddam's flouting of UN resolutions even as he
supports a country, Israel, that has flouted at least 64 of them on a
daily basis for more than half a century.
But so craven and so ineffective are the Arab regimes today that they
don't dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need US
economic aid. Many of them fear their own people and need US support to
prop up their regimes. Many of them could be accused of some of the same
crimes against humanity. So they say nothing, and just hope and pray
that the war will pass, while in the end keeping them in power as they
are.
But it is also a great and noble fact that for the first time since
World War Two there are mass protests against the war taking place
before rather than during the war itself. This is unprecedented and
should become the central political fact of the new, globalised era into
which our world has been thrust by the US and its super-power status.
What this demonstrates is that despite the awesome power wielded by
autocrats and tyrants like Saddam and his American antagonists, despite
the complicity of a mass media that has (willingly or unwillingly)
hastened the rush to war, despite the indifference and ignorance of a
great many people, mass action and mass protest on the basis of human
community and human sustainability are still formidable tools of human
resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if you wish. But that they
have at least tampered with the plans of the Washington chicken hawks
and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of religious
monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe in wars
of religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go to
lecture or speak out against these injustices I haven't found anyone in
support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition to US
action in Iraq to our support for human rights in Iraq, Palestine,
Israel, Kurdistan and everywhere in the Arab world --and also ask others
to force the same linkage on everyone, Arab, American, African,
European, Australian and Asian. These are world issues, human issues,
not simply strategic matters for the United States or the other major
powers.
We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White
House has openly announced will include three to five hundred cruise
missiles a day (800 of them during the first 48 hours of the war)
raining down on the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce
"Shock and Awe", or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as its
boastful planner a certain Mr (or is it Dr?) Harlan Ullman has said, a
Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi people. Note that during the 1991
Gulf War after 41 days of bombing Iraq this scale of human devastation
was not even approached. And the US has 6000 "smart" missiles ready to
do the job. What sort of God would want this to be a formulated and
announced policy for His people? And what sort of God would claim that
this was going to bring democracy and freedom to the people not only of
Iraq but to the rest of the Middle East?
These are questions I won't even try to answer. But I do know that if
anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth it
would be a criminal act, and its perpetrators and planners war criminals
according to the Nuremberg Laws that the US itself was crucial in
formulating. Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome
the war and praise George Bush. Who knows what more evil will be done in
the name of Good? Every one of us must raise our voices, and march in
protest, now and again and again. We need creative thinking and bold
action to stave off the nightmares planned by a docile, professionalised
staff in places like Washington and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. For if what
they have in mind is what they call "greater security" then words have
no meaning at all in the ordinary sense. That Bush and Sharon have
contempt for the non-white people of this world is clear. The question
is, how long can they keep getting away with it?
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