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<PRE>THE HOFFMAN WIRE
Dedicated to Freedom of the Press, Investigative Reporting and Revisionist History
Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor
<A HREF=" http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html
">http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html</A>
*******************************************</PRE>
March 12, 2002
Editor's note: The Warsaw/Gaza/Ramallah ghetto analogy is gaining steam,
with Yasser Arafat making similar comments of late and the Israelis
condemning the comparison as "absurd" and "obscene." Foreign Minister
Peres has had to defend against it, claiming the mass murder in the
Palestinian ghetto in the last week is a kinder, gentler version.
This outbreak of Nazi allusions to Zionism in the wake of the last
HOFFMAN WIRE and the latest update to our website, demonstrates the
power and reach of our online holocaust museum
(http://www.hoffman-info.com/palestine.html) which is updated frequently
and is read by tens of thousands around the world.
The American media make it appear as though the Palestinians are merely
irrational hotheads, using "violence" against benevolent Israelis who
only want to co-exist. The issue of defending against land-theft is
almost invisible in US reporting.
The Palestinians are fighting for their land and hence, their survival
as a people. They have the right to resist the never-ending "settler"
theft of the tiny strip of territory left to them.
The outrageous Israeli army round-ups in Ramallah of all Palestinain
males between the ages of 16 and 45 recall Nazi repression in the Warsaw
ghetto (incidentally, I have been getting hate mail from both Zionists
and neo-Nazis for making that comaprison; but what the heck, I'm an
equal opportunity heretic).
Robert Fisk herein furnishes excellent rejoinders to the usual mass
market stupidity. --M.A. H. II
AMERICA'S MORALITY HAS BEEN DISTORTED BY SEPTEMBER 11th
Robert Fisk / The Independent (Great Britain), March 7, 2002
In Afghan fields, the poppies blow. Yes, even as the Americans are
moving deeper into the Afghan trap, the warlords and gangsters running
much of the western-supported Afghan government are ensuring a bumper
new crop of heroin for the world's markets.
The UN have warned of this, of course, but nothing is being done. The
"war against terror" comes first. The broken roads and highways of
Afghanistan are now ribbons of anarchy and brigandage and murder across
the country. The pathetic little force of peace-keepers in Kabul cannot
control all of the capital, let alone the rest of the country. The
Interim President, Hamid Karzai, can scarcely control the street
outside his office. But the "war against terror" comes first.
Locked into their "war against terror" and now discovering that their
enemies want to fight them, the Americans remain equally indolent when
confronted by the infinitely more dangerous conflict 2,000 miles to the
west of Kabul, in the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Nablus,
Jenin and Gaza.
When the Israeli army goes on a shooting spree in the refugee camps and
kills 16 Palestinians, among them two children, the US calls for
"restraint". When a Palestinian suicide bomber murders a crowd of
Israelis in Jerusalem, including two babies and a 10-year old, the US
boldly blames Yasser Arafat for not "stopping terrorism" by locking up
the bad guys. And Ariel Sharon? Why, he's busy destroying the police
stations
and prisons to make sure Mr Arafat can't do what he's been ordered to
do.
When Mr Sharon actually announces that Israel must "inflict greater
losses" in other words, kill more Palestinians, Washington is silent.
Maybe it's not indolence. Maybe the Bush administration actually
believes that the man held "personally responsible" by an Israeli
commission of inquiry for the murder of 1,700 Palestinian civilians in
Beirut in 1982 really is fighting America's "war on terror".
Maybe America's moral compass has become so skewed by the crimes against
humanity on 11 September that President Bush simply no longer cares
what Mr Sharon does.
It's as if all the lessons of history in Afghanistan as well as the
Middle East have been tossed into a bin. Take ex-President Clinton. He
arrives in Israel and what does he do? He blames Mr Arafat. And what
does his preposterous wife say when she does the same thing? "Yasser
Arafat bears the responsibility for the violence that has occurred; it
rests on his shoulders ..." She says that her role as a US Senator is
"to support the Israeli people". Really? What's wrong with supporting
innocent
Palestinians as well? Wrong religion? Back-to-front writing? Wrong eye
color?
A war against colonial occupation has been transformed into an offshoot
of the "war on terror", the language of this war ever more infantile.
We now have to learn by rote the following words: tit-for-tat,
cycle-of-violence, axis of evil, bunker-buster, daisy-cutter ...
Is there no end to this childishness? No, there is not. For the latest
little killer is the word "transfer" or "resettlement". As in "the
simple answer... would be to create a vast separation from Israel,
resettling the Palestinians in Jordan, where 80 per cent of the
population is Palestinian." This comes from an article published in USA
Today.
In Israel itself, an opinion poll asks Israelis how many of them would
support "transfer" of Arabs out of their homes; of course, not Jewish
settlers off Arab land as a solution to the war. (50,000 Israelis
demonstrated in Rabin Square, demanding this "transfer" --Ed.).
This is incredible. "Transfer" is ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansing
is a war crime. If American newspapers are prepared to print such an
option and if Israelis are asked to give their opinion on it, what is
Mr Milosevic doing on trial in The Hague?
The moral collapse is already underway. Take the watering down of the US
government's latest report on human rights. In
2000, it said that Egypt's hopelessly unfair military courts "do not
ensure civilian defendants due process before an independent tribunal".
In the 2001 report, however, that sentence has been censored out. It
has to be, of course, because Mr Bush is now setting up his own
military courts to try his prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without due
process.
And while the Americans are distorting the nature of the war between
Israel and the Palestinians, they are lying about Afghanistan. General
Tommy Franks, the head of the US Central Command, refers in the
following words to the mistaken killing of 16 innocent Afghans at Hazar
Qadam: "I will not characterise it as a failure of any type."
Sorry? Either General Franks who on Tuesday managed to refer to his
newly killed soldiers as dying "in Vietnam" didn't read the facts or
he is a very disreputable man. His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, refuses to use
the word "mistake" or even
"investigation" after thousands of innocent Afghans died under US bombs
because the word "sometimes has the implication of more formality or a
disciplinary action".
When Washington's top military men are so dishonest, is it any surprise
that Israeli tanks can open fire on refugee camps without any serious
response from the US or blast cars carrying children because they want
to kill their father?
I'm beginning to suspect that 11 September is turning into a curse far
greater than the original bloodbath of that day, that America's
absorption with that terrible event is in danger of distorting our
morality. Is the anarchy of Afghanistan and the continuing slaughter in
the Middle East really to be the memorial for the thousands who died on
11 September?
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<PRE>Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press
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