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NPK-info 15-09-2001 - Nederlands Palestina Komitee / www.palestina-komitee.nl
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Het NPK verafschuwt - uiteraard - de aanslagen van dinsdag 11-9 op
onschuldige burgers.
Gesignaleert moet echter worden dat zo'n zin in deze dagen veelvuldig en
consequentieloos wordt uitgesproken.
De consequentie moet zijn [en had al lang moeten zijn] een harde
[politieke]
strijd voor een rechtvaardige samenleving, waarbij niet groepen en
volkeren
langdurig en structureel worden buitengesloten.
Er zijn ruimschoots allerlei mooie en volkenrechtelijk bindende teksten
voorhanden [Universele verklaring, Geneefse Conventie, VN-resoluties,...].
Geen vrede zonder gerechtigheid zo zei Van Aartsen onlangs; alleen nu
nog
die uitvoering.
Nog over TV-flitsen deze week.
Na het instorten van de gebouwen in New York zagen we wat feestende
Palestijnen. De suggestie was daarmee duidelijk. In de [door ons
geziene]
beelden viel niet te ontdekken dat één der feestenden geïnterviewd
werd. Op
basis van welke informatie feestte men en waarom eigenlijk zou toch een
redelijke vraag zijn geweest. Wellicht had men net de beschieting vanuit
een
F16 of een Apache overleefd.
NPK/WL, 15-9-2001
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TV-attendering: Nur Masalha en Salman Abu-Sitta
=======================================
Op zondagmiddag 16 september zal de Nederlandse Moslim Omroep (NMO)
uitgebreid aandacht besteden aan de Palestijns-Israelische kwestie en
onder
meer interviews uitzenden met dr. Nur Masalha (Palestijns historicus te
Londen) en dr. Salman Abu-Sitta (in Koeweit woonachtige, Palestijnse
expert
op het gebied van de vluchtelingenproblematiek), die eerder dit jaar, op
uitnodiging van het Nederlands Palestina Komitee, Nederland bezochten om
in
respectievelijk Den Haag en Amsterdam openbare voordrachten te houden.
Salman Abu-Sitta is tevens verbonden aan het Palestinian Return Centre
te
Londen [zie www.prrn.org].
NMO, 16 september, Nederland 1, tussen 12.00-13.00 u.
===========================================
Een samenvatting van de lezing van Nur Masalha staat op de NPK-website.
Van de hand van Nur Masalha verschenen: Expulsion of the Palestinians -
The
Concept of 'Transfer' in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948;
Washington,
D.C. [Institute for Palestine Studies] 1992, 235 pp.; A Land Without a
People - Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-96; Londen [Faber
&
Faber] 1997, 246 pp.; Imperial Israel and the Palestinians - Politics of
Expansion; Londen [Pluto Press] 2000, 279 pp.
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top
De inhoud van de nieuwe Soemoed:
jaargang 29, nummer 4 (augustus 2001)
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top
Inevitable ring to the unimaginable
By John Pilger
If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world,
who can really be surprised?
Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when
British and American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not
a
word appeared in the mainstream media in Britain.
An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust
in London, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter
known
as the Gulf War.
This was never news that touched public consciousness in the west.
At least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died
in Iraq as a result of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States
and
Britain.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave birth to the
fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the CIA.
The terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now "America's
most wanted man", allegedly planned his attacks, were built with
American
money and backing.
In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have
collapsed long ago were it not for US backing.
Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have
been its victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose
power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the
greatest
source of terrorism on earth.
This fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage"
at
best minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk,
professor
of international relations at Princeton, put it this way: "Western
foreign
policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way
legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and
innocence
portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political
violence."
That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and
has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium
and
was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be
taken
seriously when he now speaks about the "shame" of the "new
evil of mass
terrorism" says much about the censorship of our collective sense
of how the
world is managed.
One of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind.
Alas, it
is no comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who
have
died so terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the
product
of Western policies. Did the American establishment believe that it
could
bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle East without cost to itself,
or
rather its own innocent people?
The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal
of the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the
foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years
of
Israel's brutal occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated
within hours by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those who say they
represent the victims of the West's intervention in their homelands.
"America, which has never known modern war, now has her own
terrible
league table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims."
As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve
the loss of innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and
television networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of the present
coverage to the half-a-million dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500
civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no.
There are deeper roots to the atrocities in the US, which made them
almost
inevitable.
It is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south
Asia. Since the end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks,
principally
Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power
while
the divisions imposed on human beings by them and their agents have
grown as
never before.
An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80
per cent of the world's wealth.
In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms
"free market" and "free trade", the injustices are
legion: from the illegal
blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to
its
trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile
economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are
little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central
banks,
and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in
forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US
"Vietnam" in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between
North and
South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation"
status).
Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word
that journalists dare not speak or write.
The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the
Wilson government received almost no press coverage.
Their homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base from
which US bombers patrol the Middle East.
In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the
complicity of the US and British governments: the Americans supplying
General Suharto with assassination lists, then ticking off names as
people
were killed.
"Getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was
part
of the deal", says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south east
Asia
correspondent.
British behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American
record in Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the withholding of
food, villages turned into concentration camps and more than half a
million
people forcibly dispossessed.
In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire
nation was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies
and
by what Edward Said rightly calls cultural imperialism.
In Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of
around 50,000 people. As official documents now reveal, this was the
model
for the terror in Chile that climaxed with the murder of the
democratically
elected leader Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of
Nicaragua.
All of it was lawless. The list is too long for this piece.
Now imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces currently
operate with impunity from bases in 50 countries.
"Full spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim.
Read the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no
doubt.
In this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four
violent adventures, in pursuit of "British interests" (dressed
up as
"peacekeeping"), and which have little or no basis in
international law: a
record matched by no other British government for half a century.
What has this to do with this week's atrocities in America? If you
travel among the impoverished majority of humanity, you understand that
it
has everything to do with it.
People are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence
compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children
taken
away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great
enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and
more
fanaticism.
But how patient the oppressed have been.
It is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist groups,
willing to blow themselves up in Israel and New York, were formed, and
only
after Israel and the US had rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian
state, and justice for a people scarred by imperialism.
Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in
faraway brutalised places have at last come home.
John Pilger is an award-winning, campaigning journalist.
September 13, 2001
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