Monthly Archive for February, 2007

Page 5 of 8

Here we go again

Published on February 12, 2007 in Iran, Middle East and US. 0 Comments

Iran,US,Politics,Propoganda,War,George W Bush

 12 September 2002

[O]n 12 September 2002, two-thirds of the way through George W. Bush’s virtual declaration of war against Iraq, there came a dangerous tell-tale code which suggested that he really did intend to send his tanks across the Tigris River. “The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people,” he told us in the U.N. General Assembly. In the press gallery, nobody stirred. Below us, not a diplomat shifted in his seat. The speech had already rambled on for twenty minutes but the speechwriters must have known what this meant when they cobbled it together.

Before President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, he announced that America “has no quarrel with the Libyan people.” Before he bombed Iraq in 1991, Bush the Father told the world that the United States “has no quarrel with the Iraqi people.” In 2001, Bush the Son, about to strike at the Taliban and al-Qaeda, told us he “has no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan.” And now that frightening mantra was repeated. There was no quarrel, Mr. Bush said – absolutely none – with the Iraqi people.

So, I thought to myself as I scribbled my notes in the UN press gallery, it’s flak jackets on…

[Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization, Chapter 12 paragraphs 1 & 2]

26 January 2007

Our struggle is not with the Iranian people. As a matter of fact, we want them to flourish, and we want their economy to be strong. And we want their mothers to be able to raise their children in a hopeful society. My problem is with a government that takes actions that end up isolating their people and ends up denying the Iranian people their true place in the world. And so we’ll work diplomatically, and I believe we can solve our problems peacefully.

[George W. Bush, White House press release, 26 Jan 2007]

via

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The only democracy in the Middle East

Published on February 12, 2007 in Israel, Middle East and Palestine. 0 Comments

Anyone who follows the news has no doubt come across the claim that ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East’. Usually, this claim is followed by its logical inference: ‘As an island of freedom located in a region controlled by military dictators, feudal kings and religious leaders, Israel should receive unreserved support from western liberal states interested in strengthening democratic values around the globe’.

If you can get past the fact that Israel is a racist settler state, it is indeed a democracy, and a vigorous one, for Israeli Jews. And the license which is extended to the remaining Palestinians or ‘Israeli Arabs’, as the Zionists prefer to call them, within the country to participate in that political system on Zionism’s terms also gives them formal rights which are not enjoyed in most other states in the region.

Azmi Bishara, the militant and wittily perceptive Palestinian member of the Knesset, has described how whenever he is shown on al Jazeera speaking in the Knesset and denouncing the Israeli government in Arabic, he receives letters from puzzled viewers across the region asking how he can get away with saying such things openly from within the ‘Zionist entity’, while they could never get away with being similarly outspoken about their own governments.

He comments that when confronted with the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ line, he feels like responding ‘take your democracy and give us back Palestine’.

And that is the point. The conflict is not about the relative merits of different systems of government, it is about colonisation and disposession. Zionism did not come to the Middle East to bring Western standards of progress and democracy to the poor downtrodden Arabs. So formal comparisons of Israel’s political system with that of Arab regimes are simply irrelevant – just as it is irrelevant to the Suez aggression that Britain France and Israel were democracies, and Nasser a dictator.

It’s probably worth noting that a few years back Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were asked what country in the region they would like to take as a model for the political system of a Palestinian state. The winner by a landslide was Israel. Of course they did not mean by that, that they wished to be second-class citizens in a discriminatory state – just that they wanted for themselves what Israeli Jews already have.

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The thrill of saying something vile

Published on February 11, 2007 in Islamophobia and UK. 0 Comments

Mukul Kesavan in the Calcutta Telegraph on Christopher Hitchens and the rest of the ‘A muslim ate my hamster’ brigade:

[I]n Hitchens’s bizarre world, the world’s largest pluralist democracy, home to the third-largest Muslim population in the world, would make common cause with the likes of Amis and Steyn whose prescriptions for saving civilization include systematic discrimination against Muslims, collective punishment, deportation and strategic “culling”. Hitchens argues that it’s important for liberals to stake out this rhetorical position because he doesn’t want anti-Islamism (his term for being anti-Muslim in a respectable way) to become the monopoly of fascists. Muscular liberals like Amis and Hitchens would deny them that space.

By a grotesque ideological sleight of hand, Hitchens would join the West to this great “multi-ethnic democracy” using arguments that are only used in India by parties that would, if they could, create an ethnic, Hindu supremacist state. This convergence is not an accident: by making prejudice respectable, by short-circuiting due process, by presuming collective guilt instead of affirming the presumption of individual innocence, Hitchens and Amis have become what they pretend to pre-empt.

It’s not a nice picture: Milosevic, Le Pen, Nick Griffin, Bal Thackeray, Praveen Togadia, Narendra Modi, Mark Steyn, Martin Amis and Hitchens bringing up the rear. Captions occur to me: Group Portrait with Rabies, perhaps, or Christopher and his Kind.

[Christopher and his kind, Mukul Kesavan, Calcutta Telegraph]

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