|
|
home / subscribe / donate / tower / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events
|
HOW HADITHA HAPPENED; WHY IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN "You live like an animal. You learn to like killing. .. Hate civilians. Can't trust the bastards. You hate taking prisoners. You'd rather kill them. Why?" Read Vietnam vet Marc Levy's extraordinary Primer on the Whys and Wherefores of PTSD and understand what is happening in Iraq. PLUS Andrew Lack on the incredible frauds of the bottled water industry. Why you should drink tapwater out of a glass and save your money PLUS Jeffrey St Clair on the deadly secrets of America's oldest bomb factory PLUS Chris Reed on Eros and Militarization: how Japan's sexpot schoolgirls fit into the right's Re-Arm agenda. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
|
Today's Stories June 23, 2006 Youmans / Erakat Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Col. Dan Smith
June 22, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Winslow T.
Wheeler Tanya Reinhart Mike Marqusee William Blum
June 21, 2006 Ramzy Baroud Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp Greg Moses
June 20, 2006 Fred Gardner Omar Waraich Christopher Reed CP Newswire Jonathan Cook
June 19, 2006 Bill Quigley John Walsh Mike Whitney Alexander Cockburn
June 16 / 18,
2006 Kathy / Bill
Christision Joseph Nevins Farrah Hassen Greg Moses Nicole Colson John Scagliotti Mokhiber / Weissmann
June 15, 2006 Kathy Kelly Norman Solomon Ron Jacobs Sam Bahour Ramzy Baroud CounterPunch Wire Gabriel Kolko Website of the Day
June 14, 2006 Nicole Colson Jonathan Cook Joseph Schechla Michael Carmichael Evelyn Pringle Ward Churchill Rev. William E. Alberts Website of the
Day
June 13, 2006 Medea Benjamin Anthony Alessandrini Paul D'Amato Dave Lindorff John Ross Gabriel Garcia Hilton Obenzinger Yitzhak Laor Juan Antonio
Ocasio Rivera Jennifer Van
Bergen Website of the
Day
June 12, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Patrick Cockburn Mike Marqusee Lee Sustar Robert Fisk Michael J. Smith Felice Pace Jennifer Loewenstein Website of the Day
June 10 / 11,
2006 Robert Fisk Diane Christian Joe Allen Ralph Nader Fred Gardner Dave Lindorff Dave Zirin /
John Cox Dennis Perrin Greg Moses John Chuckman Michael J. Smith Roger Burbach Ira Moskowitz Sam Bahour Seth Sandronsky Michael Berg Kirsten Roberts Ron Jacobs Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of the
Weekend
June 9, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Paul Craig Roberts Gary Leupp Eric Ruder Evelyn Pringle Mickey Z. Michael J. Smith Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
June 8, 2006 Chris Floyd Michael Dickinson Ron Jacobs William S. Lind Joshua Frank Missy Comley Beattie Lloyd Williams Bill Christison Website of the Day
June 7, 2006 Dave Lindorff Sunsara Taylor John Walsh David MacMichael Mickey Z. Evelyn Pringle Myles Palmer Laura Ribeiro Website of the Day
June 6, 2006 Diane Christian Paul Craig Roberts Ralph Nader Norman Solomon Darmont / Genovali Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Subcomandante Marcos Patrick Cockburn Website of the Day
June 5, 2006 Bruce Jackson Chris Floyd Michael Neumann Heather Gray William Hughes David Swanson Alexander Cockburn Website of the Day
June 3 / 4, 2006 Robert Fisk James Petras Rosemary Radford Ruether Harry Clark Jeffrey St. Clair Ron Ridenour Ron Jacobs Fred Gardner Peter Montague John Walsh Greg Moses Sean Donahue Mike Whitney Dave Patten Ali Khan Robert Dotson,
MD Hammond Guthrie St. Clair / D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website of the
Day
June 2, 2006 Kathy Kelly Alan Maass Mickey Z. Dave Lindorff Chris Kutalik Sunsara Taylor Sam Husseini Mike Ferner Website of the
Day
June 1, 2006 Brian Cloughley David Peterson Lee Ballinger Jonathan Cook Mike Whitney Paul Rockwell Clifton Ross Kevin Zeese Website of the
Day
May 31, 2006 Dave Lindorff Joshua Frank Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz P. Sainath Ramzy Baroud Seth Sandronsky Mickey Z. Ralph Nader Jeffrey St. Clair Website of the Day
May 30, 2006 Lee Ballinger Jonathan Cook Gary Leupp John Ross Robert Jensen Michael Dickinson Michael Carmichael Tim Wise Harry Browne Website of the
Day
May 27 / 29,
2006 Paul Craig Roberts Kathleen Christison Kathy Kelly Christopher
Reed Lawrence R. Velvel Tom Barry Gary Leupp Col. Dan Smith Ron Jacobs Don Fitz Fred Gardner Peter Montague Raymond Garcia John Farley Seth Sandronsky Tia Steele Lenni Brenner Dr. Susan Block Scott Michael Perey Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Recipe of the
Weekend Website of the Weekend
May 26, 2006 Col. Douglas
MacGregor Brian J. Foley Michael Dickinson Missy Comley Beattie Pierre Tristam Joe Allen Kona Lowell Roger Burbach Website of the
Day
May 25, 2006 Les AuCoin Jeff Halper Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Bob Wing Elise Gould Robert Bryce Website of the Day
May 24, 2006 Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Lucinda Marshall Dave Lindorff Shmuel Rosner Moshe Adler Heather Gray Pratyush Chandra Paul Craig Roberts Floyd Rudmin Website of the Day
May 23, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Sharon Smith Sunsara Taylor Joel Whitney Alice Cherbonnier Ron Jacobs Kristen Ess Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
Subscribe Online
|
June 26, 2006 Another Escalation from the PalestiniansIsraeli "Retaliation" and Double StandardsBy JONATHAN COOK The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli "reprisals" and "retaliation", according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel and Gaza yesterday. The attack by the Palestinians, who sneaked through tunnels under the electronic fence surrounding Gaza, marked a "major escalation in cross-border tension" (Alan Johnston) that threatened to overturn "a week of progress on two fronts" (John Lyon): namely, the recent talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan, and between rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas. Thus, according to the BBC's analysis, this attack ends the immediate chances for "peace" negotiations and provides the context for the next round of the conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinians of Gaza. We are left to infer that all the suffering the army inflicts in the coming days and weeks should be attributed to this moment of "escalation" by the Palestinians. We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population and deepening the psychological trauma suffered by a generation of children. We can ignore the deaths of more than 30 civilians, and dozens of horrific injuries, in the past few weeks at the hands of the Israeli military, including three children hit in a botched air strike last week, and a heavily pregnant woman and her doctor brother killed a day later as a missile slammed into the room where they were eating dinner. We can ignore the blockade
of Gaza's "borders" by the Israeli army for months
on end, which has prevented Palestinians in the Strip from trading
goods at crossing points with Israel and from receiving vital
supplies of food We can ignore Israel's bullying of the international community to connive in the starving of the Hamas-led government of funds and diplomatic room for manoeuvre, thereby preventing the elected Palestinian leadership from running Gaza. So desperate is the situation there that Hamas officials are being forced to smuggle in millions of dollars of cash stuffed in suitcases to pay salaries. And finally we can ignore the violation of Palestinian territory by Israeli commandos who infiltrated Gaza a day before the Palestinian attack to kidnap two Palestinians Israel claims are terrorists. They have been "disappeared", doubtless to be be held in administrative detention, where they can denied access to lawyers, the courts and, of course, justice. None of this provides the context for the Palestinian attack on the army post -- any more than, in the BBC's worldview, do the previous four decades of occupation. None is apparently relevant to understanding the Palestinian attack, or for judging the legitimacy of Israel's imminent military "reprisals". In short, according to the BBC, we can ignore Israel's long-standing policy of unilateralism -- a refusal to negotiate meaningfully with the Palestinians, either the old guard of Fatah or the new one of Hamas -- with its resort to a strategy of collective punishment of Gaza's population to make it submit to the continuing occupation. In the skewed moral and news priorities of the BBC, the killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinian militants -- the "escalation" -- provides a justification for "fierce retaliation" against Gaza, with the inevitable toll on Palestinian civilians and militants alike. The earlier killing of tens of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, however, is not presented as justification for yesterday's Palestinian retaliation against the army. In other words, on the scale of moral outrage the BBC ranks the deaths of Israeli soldiers enforcing an illegal occupation far above those of Palestinian civilians enduring the illegal occupation. There is another notable asymmetry in the BBC's assessment of the "escalation". Participation by the military wing of Hamas in the attack is evidence, suggest the reporters, of the role of the Palestinian leadership in "escalating tension". But the killing by the Israeli army of a Palestinian family of seven on a Gaza beach on June 9, and many more civilians since, was apparently not an "escalation", even though it provoked Hamas to renounce a ceasefire it had maintained for 16 months in the face of continuous Israeli military assaults. So how is the ordinary viewer to make sense of these events -- the endless "cycle of violence" -- with the BBC as guide. (And the BBC is no worse, and possibly better, than most of other Western broadcasters. At least its reporter Alan Johnston is based in Gaza.) Not only do its reporters exhibit the biases associated with its institutional racism -- as an organisation, the BBC chooses to identify with Israeli concerns before Palestinian ones -- but they then compound this distortion by repeating uncritically Israel's own misrepresentation of events. The reporters, like so many of their colleagues, fall into the trap of presenting the conflict through the eyes of the Israeli government, the same government whose prime minister, Ehud Olmert, last week proudly displayed his ethnic chauvinism by setting the suffering of the Jewish residents of Sderot, who face a mostly non-lethal smattering of Palestinian home-made Qassam rockets, far above the rising death toll of Gaza's civilians from the army's constant aerial and artillery bombardment. "I am sorry with all my heart for the residents of Gaza," Olmert said, "but the lives and well-being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza residents." In other words, a potential threat to a single Jew is more important than the deaths of dozens of Palestinian innocents. Thus we learn without comment from the BBC that Olmert has denounced the killing of the two soldiers as "terrorism", even though the word cannot describe an attack by an occupied people on an occupying army. How is it possible for a few men with light arms to terrorise one of the most powerful armies in the world? What next: are we to listen sympathetically to claims by the US that its soldiers are being "terrorised" by Iraqi insurgents? The defence that the BBC is simply reporting Israel's position does not stand up to scrutiny. Is it even conceivable that we might hear a BBC reporter neutrally repeat a Hamas statement that the Israeli army is terrorising Palestinians by reckless shelling civilians in Gaza, even though the word's usage in this case would better satisfy the dictionary definition? The shells most certainly do spread terror among Gaza's civilian population. We hear too without comment that Olmert is holding both Hamas and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the attack. The BBC dutily repeats Israeli claims that Abbas has the resources to fight "terror" even as the money to pay Palestinian security forces is held by foreign banks unwilling, at Israeli and American behest, to hand it over, and as Hamas and Abbas are locked in battle for control of the Palestinians' shrinking government. Does common sense not recoil from the suggestion that both Hamas and Abbas can be equally blamed for the attack when the two are bitter rivals for power? Or that either can be held accountable when Israel has refused to negotiate with them or treat them as the genuine representatives of the Palestinian people? Again, would the BBC report with due solemnity claims by the Palestinians that they hold Olmert and Peretz personally guilty for the civilian deaths in Gaza over the past fortnight, even though in an enlightened world both should be standing trial for war crimes? Instead, however implausible the Israeli version of reality, the BBC happily sows confusion on behalf of the Israeli army. Like other broadcasters, it credulously reports preposterous arguments seeking to exonerate the Israeli army of responsibility for the shelling of the beach in Gaza that killed a Palestinian family of seven. It treats as equally credible the army's belated version in which Palestinian militants are said to have laid a single mine at a favourite seaside picnic spot in the futile hope of preventing the Israeli navy landing along the Strip's miles of coastline. (In consequence, the BBC excludes the seven dead and dozens of Palestinian injured in that Israeli attack from its list of recent civilian casualties in Gaza). And both BBC reporters note gravely Israel's concerns that this is the first time Palestinian militants have broken out of the fenced-off Strip since Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly a year ago. Somehow the fact that the Palestinians have briefly escaped from their cage appears to make the attack all the more shocking not only for Israel but for the two reporters. This attack in Israel, they tell us, is the most serious to date, with the implication that it is therefore illegitimate and part of the same "escalation". Even ignoring the fact that this attack was against Israeli soldiers besieging, imprisoning and shelling the Palestinians of Gaza, does the BBC not to pause to consider the double standard it is applying? Was the Israeli army's incursion into Gaza a day earlier to capture two alleged Palestinian militants not an equal escalation? Was it not an equal violation of Palestinian sovereignty? Of course not. The BBC knows, as do the rest of us, that the army never really left Gaza and the occupation never really ended. But you won't hear that from any of its reporters. Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
|
from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                    |
