Israeli Missiles Rip Into Medics' Esprit de Corps

The world has expressed outrage at the deliberate Israeli attack on an UN observation post, killing 4 UN Observers which seems to have achieved Israels aims as the UN decares it will close all it's posts in southern Lebanon. This allows Israel to hide the war crimes being committed by them daily as in this report from the LA Times not to mention the targetting of clearly marked refugee caravans.

Writers Protest Israel's War on Lebanese

A Letter to the Press
from 18 writers - including 3 Nobel Prize recipients.

The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began
when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother,
from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the
Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli
soldier prisoner - and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis - there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.

That this "kidnapping" was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources - most particularly that of water - by the Israeli Defence (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.

Today outrage follows outrage; makeshift missiles cross sophisticated ones. The latter usually find their target situated where the disinherited and crowded poor live, waiting for what was once called Justice. Both categories of missile rip bodies apart horribly - who but field commanders can forget this for a moment?

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

This has to be said loud and clear for the practice, only half declared
and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it
must be unceasingly and eternally recognised for what it is and
resisted.

PS: As Juliano Mer Khamis, director of the documentary film Arna's
Children, asked: "Who is going to paint the 'Guernica' of Lebanon?"


John Berger
Noam Chomsky
Harold Pinter
Jos? Saramago
Eduardo Galeano
Arundhati Roy
Naomi Klein
Howard Zinn
Charles Glass
Richard Falk
Gore Vidal
Russell Banks
Thomas Keneally
Chris Abani
Carolyn Forche
Martin Espada
Jessica Hagedorn
Toni Morrison
[This letter has been printed in Le Monde, Paris; El Pais, Madrid, The
Independent, London, La Republica, Milan, etc. etc., including in
Israel.]
Contact
John Berger
Quincy, Mieussy
74440 TANINGES, FRANCE
TEL/FAX - 00-33-450-430 336
email: witchazel@wanadoo.fr

Grannies for Peace

A new force in opposition to the Iraq war is spreading across the US.

Racist cartoons: Why Muslims have a right to be angry

Like most western leftists I have been perplexed by the face the Muslim world often presents to the world. The fatwa threatening death against S.Rushdie and many muslim women who oppose the mysogymist treatment of women in the middle east, the recent case in Afghanistan where a christian convert was threatened by death under Sharia law.

I support the just struggle of most people under threat of the depredations of imperialism, today so represented by the US New World Order. The thirst for oil in the west has unleashed a holocaust on most peoples of the middle east and the racist and repressive actions of the Israel allie and western guard-dog to the subject Palestinian people has rubbed their faces in it.

But the damn fools keep undermining my support.

It is little recognised in the western world why so many people of color adhere to the muslim faith despite the arab traders who transported so many slaves to west african ports to be transported by European and American ships to a life of penury in the colonies.

Basically it was because the tenets of Mohammed did not have a racist base like most of Christianity. Despite the warrior expansion of crusading muslims they spared "the people of the book" christians and jews and allowed them to continue their faith. There is also a peaceful live and let live spirit among many muslims, so represented by the spiritualist Sufi sect.

It must be recognised that in the muslim world just as in the christian world that fundamentalist beliefs are not the usual interpretations of their holy books. The KKK or born-again Rapture are just as foreign to christianity as many of the fatwas of muslim fundamentalists issued by some obscure Iman.

As an atheist I defend neither and oppose both. And I am sure most muslims and christians, however mistaken I feel they are, also do the same.