George Habash R.I.P
January 28, 2008
Popular front man. ‘Unjustly notorious for his PFLP’s plane hijackings, George Habash gave vital inspiration to the secular democratic strand of modern Arab politics,’ writes Karma Nabulsi.
“His very name scatters fire through ice,” wrote Byron of an 18th-century revolutionary leader, and so it has always been with the name of that extraordinary Palestinian, George Habash. Habash died an impoverished refugee in enforced exile in Amman this weekend. What, then, can this revolutionary of a bygone area, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, virtuoso rhetorician, with his charismatic grin, perpetual cigarette and black leather jacket, provide us with now to address today’s bleak geopolitical predicament?
Habash was the archetype of the medic hero, with his free clinic in the Jordan refugee camp, yet his all but forgotten contribution offers a number of powerful lessons to the Middle East today. In an era of unprecedented Arab disunity and reactionary conservatism, and at the zenith of what appears to be an unstoppable juggernaut of Israeli expansionism and accelerating Palestinian defeat and political fragmentation, his model of combining univeralist principle with popular mobilisation remains the key to future progress.
Listening To Grasshoppers
January 28, 2008
Arundhati Roy on ‘Genocide, Denial And Celebration‘.
I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, “We are all Armenians”, “We are all Hrant Dink”. Perhaps I’d have carried the one that said, “One and a half million plus one”.* [*One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]
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In a way, my battle is like yours. But while in Turkey there’s silence, in India, there is celebration.
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The Last Days of the American Republic
January 28, 2008
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Chalmers Johnson for a discussion of his new book, Nemesis. In the interview, Johnson, an Emeritus Professor of the University of California, analyzes the impact of the American empire on democracy at home. Comparing the United States to Rome and Great Britain, he argues that a combination of military Keynesianism, the Bush administration’s attempt to implement a unitary presidency, and the failed checks on executive ambition point to political and economic bankruptcy. (Thanks Shahbaaz)
Return to Fallujah
January 28, 2008
Three years after the devastating US assault, [Patrick Cockburn] enters besieged Iraqi city left without clean water, electricity and medicine.
The last time I tried to drive to Fallujah, several years ago, I was caught in the ambush of an American fuel convoy and had to crawl out of the car and lie beside the road with the driver while US soldiers and guerrillas exchanged gunfire. The road is now much safer but nobody is allowed to enter Fallujah who does not come from there and can prove it through elaborate identity documents. The city has been sealed off since November 2004 when United States Marines stormed it in an attack that left much of the city in ruins.Its streets, with walls pock-marked with bullets and buildings reduced to a heap of concrete slabs, still look as if the fighting had finished only a few weeks ago.
Our Model Dictator
January 28, 2008
‘The death of Suharto is a reminder of the west’s ignoble role in propping up a murderous regime’, writes John Pilger.
In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. “This is an historically unique moment,” says one of them, “that is truly uniquely historical.”
This was Gareth Evans, Australia’s then foreign minister. The other man was Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian dictator General Suharto, who died yesterday. The year was 1989, and the two were making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that would allow Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was “zillions of dollars”.
‘Reality Is Totally Different’
January 28, 2008
Dahr Jamail on the ‘Missing Voices in the Iraq Debate’. In his introduction to the piece Tom Engelhart writes: ‘There’s an old joke in which a fellow natters on endlessly about himself. Finally, he turns to his friend and says, “Well, enough about me, how about you? What do you think of me?” Sometimes, we in the U.S. seem to be that guy. There are so many voices crucial to understanding our world that we seldom or never hear. They just aren’t attended to…In many ways, we Americans, whether supporters or critics of the war, manage to fill all the roles when it comes to that country…Dahr Jamail has been an exception. If you pick up a copy of his riveting book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, perhaps the most striking thing about it is how many Iraqi voices you do hear and what a different perspective they offer us on our version of their country.’
Iraqis on “Success” and “Progress” in Their Country
This March 19 will be the fifth anniversary of the shock-and-awe air assault on Baghdad that signaled the opening of the invasion of Iraq, and when it comes to the American occupation of that country, no end is yet in sight. If Republican presidential candidate John McCain has anything to say about it, the occupation may never end. On January 7th, he assured reporters that he was more than fine with the idea of the U.S. military remaining in Iraq for 100 years. “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea 50 years or so… As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me.”
Ambition, Power and the Clintons
January 27, 2008
Return to Triangulation. Ralph Nader on the Clinton record.
For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the ultimate American dream is eight more years. Yet how do you think they would react to having dozens of partisans at their rallies sporting large signs calling for EIGHT MORE YEARS, EIGHT MORE YEARS?
Don’t you have the feeling that they would cringe at such public displays of their fervent ambition which the New York Times described as a “truly two-for-the-price-of-one” presidential race? It might remind voters to remember or examine the real Clinton record in that peaceful decade of missed opportunities and not be swayed by the sugarcoating version that the glib former president emits at many campaign stops.
Iranians in Solidarity with Gaza
January 27, 2008
While Egypt and Jordan help enforce Israel’s blockade of the Palestinians, and while their populations work themselves silly looking for naked pictures of Haifa Wehbe (yes, it still remains the top google search term for the Middle East), the task of showing solidarity is left to the Iranians. Press TV reports:
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to protest the perpetual atrocities committed by the Zionist regime in Gaza.
In an effort to convey their message to world politicians, demonstrators rallied in Tehran after the Friday prayers chanting slogans and condemning the siege on the Gaza Strip.
They denounced the silence of international bodies and all those who claim to be defending human rights, urging the international community to take action.
Letter to the New Left
January 27, 2008
C. Wright Mills wrote this letter nearly half a century back (New Left Review, No. 5, September-October 1960), but most the arguments made herein — especially the critique of end-of-ideology proponents, the media, and ‘Victorian Marxists’ — remain just as valid today.
WHEN I settle down to write to you, I feel somehow “freer” than usual. The reason, I suppose, is that most of the time I am writing for people whose ambiguities and values I imagine to be rather different from mine; but with you, I feel enough in common with you to allow us “to get on with it” in more positive ways. Reading your book, Out of Apathy, prompts me to write to you about several problems I think we now face. On none of these can I hope to be definitive; I only want to raise a few questions.
It is no exaggeration to say that since the end of World War II in Britain and the United States smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals have carried on a very wearied discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted; the sickness of complacency has prevailed, the bi-partisan banality flourished. There is no need — after your book — to explain again why all this has come about among “people in general” in the NATO countries; but it may be worthwhile to examine one style of cultural work that is in effect an intellectual celebration of apathy.
The World’s Greatest Prison-Break
January 27, 2008
Amos Harel in Ha’aretz on how Hamas outmaneuvered Israel, Egypt and Fatah in three quick moves, while James Hider of Times reports on how Hamas ‘spent months cutting through Gaza wall in secret operation’. In gesture of Egyptian solidarity perhaps, Times reports ‘ Egyptian shopkeepers swiftly raised prices of milk, taxi rides and cigarettes’. Ahdaf Soueif on the threats and opportunities presented Egypt by the exodus. And finally, an in-depth report on the developments in and future prospects for Gaza by Peter Beaumont of the Observer. ‘Gaza’s falling wall changes Middle East map for ever’, he writes.
They came and went in lorries and gas tankers, in flatbed trucks loaded with cattle and sheep, in coaches and mini-buses, loaded by the dozen in the backs of trucks, all shuttling across Gaza’s southern border. Four days ago they went on foot like refugees, but yesterday for the first time the trucks drove through and it felt like an unstoppable momentum had been reached.They carried generators and goats, diesel and huge piles of carrots and cabbages. But most of all they carried the message that Israel’s long blockade of Gaza is over. ‘I want to get some cheese,’ says Ameera Ahmad, after crossing the border from Gaza into Egypt yesterday. ‘And honey. Look, crisps! I haven’t seen a bag of crisps for months.’The teenager in the car’s front sticks his head out of the window into the crush of vehicles and people. ‘Jibna!’ he shouts, meaning cheese. It is not a request, although there are people selling it nearby. It is an affirmation of the possibilities outside Gaza. Read the rest of this entry »
