Mahmoud Darwish
- Details
- Written by Peter Clark, The Guardian Peter Clark, The Guardian
- Published: 11 August 2008 11 August 2008
- Hits: 2836 2836
Poet, author and politician who helped to forge a Palestinian consciousness
after the six-day war in 1967
Peter Clark The Guardian, Monday August 11 2008
They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You're a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You're a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You're a refugee.
With poems from the 1960s such as this, Mahmoud Darwish, who has died in a
Texas hospital aged 67 of complications following open-heart surgery, did as
much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness, and especially
after the six-day war of June 1967. His poems have been taught in schools
throughout the Arab world and set to music; some of his lines have become
part of the fabric of modern Arabic culture.
Darwish was born in the village of Birwa, east of Acre. His parents were
from middle-ranking peasant families. Both were preoccupied with work on
their land and Mahmoud was effectively brought up by his grandfather. When
he was six, Israeli armed forces assaulted the village and Mahmoud fled with
his family to Lebanon, living first in Jezzin and then in Damour.
When, the following year, the family returned to their occupied homeland,
their village had been obliterated: two settlements had been erected on the
land, and they settled in Deir al-Asad in Galilee. There were no books in
Darwish's own home and his first exposure to poetry was through listening to
an itinerant singer on the run from the Israeli army. He was encouraged to
write poetry by an elder brother.
Israeli Arabs lived under military rule from 1948 to 1986. They were curbed
in their movements and in any political activity. As a child, Darwish grew
up aware that as far as those in control were concerned he, his family and
his fellow Palestinians were second-class citizens. Yet they were still
expected to join in Israeli state celebrations. While at school, he wrote a
poem for an anniversary of the foundation of the state. The poem was an
outcry from an Arab boy to a Jewish boy. "I don't remember the poem," he
recalled many years later, "but I remember the idea of it; you can play in
the sun as you please, and have your toys, but I can't. You have a house,
and I have none. You have celebrations, but I have none. Why can't we play
together?" He recalls being summoned to see the military governor, who
threatened him: "If you go on writing such poetry, I'll stop your father
working in the quarry."
But relations with individual Jewish Israelis varied. Some he liked,
including at least one of his teachers, some he loathed. Relationships with
Jewish girls were easier than with girls from the more conservative Arab
families.
At his school, contemporaries remember him being very good in Hebrew.
Israeli Palestinian culture was cut off from mainstream Arab developments.
Arab poets who did impress him were the Iraqis Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. Exciting innovations such as the Beirut group that
clustered round the magazine al-Shi'r and the prosodic and thematic
innovations of the Syrian poets Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Asbar) and Nizar
Kabbani did not reach the beleaguered Palestinians directly. Instead, much
of Darwish's early reading of the poetry of the world outside Palestine was
through the medium of Hebrew. Through Hebrew translations he got to know the
work of Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. He also became influenced by
Hebrew literature from the Torah to the modern poet Yehuda Amichai.
His first poetry symbolised the Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule. His
first volumes, Leaves of the Olive Tree (1964), A Lover from Palestine
(1966) and End of the Night (1967), were published in Israel. During this
time Darwish was a member of the Israeli Communist party, Rakah, and edited
the Arabic edition of the party's newspaper, Al-Ittihad. Israeli
Palestinians were restricted in any expression of nationalist feeling.
Darwish went to prison several times and was frequently under house arrest.
His earliest poetry followed classical forms, but, from the mid-1960s, it
became populist and direct. He used imagery that he could relate intimately
to Palestinian villagers. He wrote of olive groves and orchards, the rocks
and plants, basil and thyme. These early poems have a staccato effect, like
verbal hand-grenades. In spite of an apparent simplicity, his short poems
have several levels of meaning. There is a sense of anger, outrage and
injustice, notably in the celebrated Identity Card, in the voice of an Arab
man giving his identity number:
Write down at the top of the first page:
I do not hate people.
I steal from no one.
However
If I am hungry
I will eat the flesh of my usurper.
Beware beware of my hunger
And of my anger.
But his poetry also contained irony and a universal humanity. For Darwish
the issue of Palestine became a prism for an internationalist feeling. The
land and history of Palestine was a summation of millennia, with influences
from Canaanites, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Ottoman Turks and British.
Throughout all this has survived a core identity of Palestine. He was able
to see the Israeli soldier as a victim of circumstances like himself. He
expresses the bureaucratic absurdities of an oppressive military occupation.
Darwish left Israel in 1971, to the disappointment of many Palestinians, and
studied at Moscow University. After a brief period in Cairo he went to
Beirut and held a number of jobs with the Palestine Research Centre. He
remained in Beirut during the first part of the civil war and left with
Yasser Arafat and the PLO in 1982. He moved on to Tunis and Paris, and
became editor-in-chief of the influential literary review Al-Karmel.
Although he became a member of the PLO executive committee in 1987 and
helped to draft the Palestinian Declaration of Statehood, he tried to keep
away from factionalism. "I am a poet with a particular perspective on
reality," he said.
His literary work was changing. He wrote short stories and developed a style
of writing poems that was a mixture of observation, humanity and irony. He
argued that poetry was easier to write than prose. But the poetry continued
inspired by incidents or relationships. There is often an optimism against
all the odds in his works of the 1980s:
Streets encircle us
As we walk among the bombs.
Are you used to death?
I'm used to life and to endless desire.
Do you know the dead?
I know the ones in love.
During his Paris years Darwish wrote Memory for Forgetfulness, a memoir of
Beirut under the saturation Israeli bombing of 1982 which has been
translated into English. A poem in prose, it is a medley of wit and rage,
with reflections on violence and exile.
His later work became more mystical and less particularly concerned with
Palestine. Often it was preoccupied with human mortality. He was careless of
his own health and suffered heart attacks in 1984 and in early 1998.
Darwish resigned from the PLO executive committee over the 1993 Oslo
Agreements between Israel and the PLO, which he saw as a "risky accord". He
was able to return to Israel to see his aged mother in 1995. The Israeli
authorities also gave him permission for an unlimited stay in the
self-ruling parts of the Palestinian West Bank, and he spent his last years
in Ramallah and Amman, the capital of Jordan.
In 2000 the Israeli ministry of education proposed to introduce his works
into the school curriculum, but met strong opposition from rightwing
protesters. The then prime minister, Ehud Barak, said the country was not
ready.
Darwish's work has been translated into Hebrew and, in July 2007, Darwish
returned to Israel on a visit and gave a reading of his poetry to 2,000
people in Haifa. He deplored the Hamas victory in Gaza the previous month.
"We have triumphed,' he observed with grim irony. "Gaza has won its
independence from the West Bank. One people now have two states, two prisons
who don't greet each other. We are dressed in executioners' clothes."
Over the years Darwish received many honours. He was given the Soviet
Union's Lotus prize in 1969, and the Lenin peace prize in 1983. He was
president of the Union of Palestinian Writers. Married and divorced twice,
he had no children; his first wife was the Syrian writer Rana Kabbani, who
elegantly translated some of his poetry into English.
Margaret Obank writes: Mahmoud was a completely secular person, rather
philosophical, an avid reader, elegant in his dress, and supremely modest in
his opinion of himself. He liked to be alone, but would always be ready to
speak on the telephone.
While I had been reading his poems since the early 1970s, I got to know him
through my husband, the Iraqi author Samuel Shimon. Mahmoud supported
Banipal, the literary magazine we founded in 1998, and took pride both in
issues of the journal and the many dialogues we helpled to promote.
It presents work by Arab authors and poets in English for the first time.
When we rang Mahmoud three months ago about doing a special issue on him,
his reaction was: "Do you think I deserve that? If you think I do, then I
like the idea." Now it will be a tribute to him.
We were with Mahmoud when he was awarded the Prince Claus Fund of principal
prize in Amsterdam in 2004, the theme being asylum and migration. His
acceptance speech was both powerful and thoughtful: "A person can only be
born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the
exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and
oppression into a nightmare. Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture
the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over
again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that
enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with
life."
· Mahmoud Darwish, poet, born March 15 1941; died August 9 2008
Free Gaza Movement Update 4: Saturday Night in Nicosia
- Details
- Written by Tom Nelson, AUPHR Tom Nelson, AUPHR
- Published: 10 August 2008 10 August 2008
- Hits: 4861 4861
There have been many frustrations since the last update. The boats are reportedly on their way to Larnaca, Cyprus, but mechanical and technical problems are plaguing them. This has allowed those waiting here in Nicosia to iron out some serious policy issues and to drill down on some medical training that we otherwise would not have had time for. And it has allowed us to form bonds and common understandings that should serve us well once we’re on the boats.
On the policy front, there has been much discussion of just how reactive/provocative we should be in the face of Israeli interception either in international or in Gazan waters (we will not be passing through Israeli waters). We are very close to consensus on this, and also have pretty much resolved how we would handle (i) Israeli boarding of the boats, (ii) Israeli towing of the boats to Israeli waters, (iii) arrest, (iv) interrogation, (v) jail solidarity, and (vi) press/public relations matters in the face of all of the above. We’ve also had some instruction in boat safety, and with the arrival of Dr. Bill (from Omak, WA), we’ve received training for serious medical emergencies while afloat, including triage (using films of Palestinians arriving in ambulances from the Israeli attacks on Beit Hanoun) and related emergency procedures. As Dr. Bill says, “Plan for the worst, hope for the best.” Dr. Bill and I will both be on the SS Liberty, which means that the voyage will be lively.
Read more: Free Gaza Movement Update 4: Saturday Night in Nicosia
Mahmoud Darwish, poet of the Palestinians, dies
- Details
- Written by Mohammed Assadi and Ali Sawafta, Reuters Mohammed Assadi and Ali Sawafta, Reuters
- Published: 09 August 2008 09 August 2008
- Hits: 2772 2772
President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning to honour the 67-year-old writer who, a close friend said, never came round from a major operation two days earlier.
"The passing of our great poet, Mahmoud Darwish, the lover of Palestine, the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project, and the brilliant national leader, will leave a great gap in our political, cultural and national lives," Abbas said.
"Words cannot describe the depth of sadness in our hearts," he added. "Mahmoud, may God help us for your loss."
The death of a man whose life and words were tightly bound up in a struggle for a Palestinian national rebirth that seems little closer now than when his first work was published in 1960 immediately triggered a wider outpouring of popular emotion.
An Israeli Jew in Gaza: A Statement by Jeff Halper
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- Written by Jeff Halper Jeff Halper
- Published: 07 August 2008 07 August 2008
- Hits: 2538 2538
Jeff Halper
Director
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)
P.O. Box 2030
91020 Jerusalem, Israel
Office: +972 (0)2-624-5560
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
http://www.icahd.org
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
-- Emerson
"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."
-- Mark Twain
An Israeli Jew in Gaza: A Statement by Jeff Halper
In another few days, I will sail on one of the Free Gaza movement boats from Cyprus to Gaza. The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of the basic necessities of life, stripped of their most fundamental human rights and dignity. The siege violates the most fundamental principle of international law: the inadmissibility of harming civilian populations. Our voyage also exposes Israel’s attempt to absolve itself of responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. Israel’s claim that there is no Occupation, or that the Occupation ended with “disengagement,” is patently false. Occupation is defined in international law as having effective control over a territory. If Israel intercepts our boats, it is clear that it is the Occupying Power exercising effective control over Gaza. Nor has the siege anything to do with “security.” Like other elements of the Occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Israel has also besieged cities, towns, villages and whole regions, the siege on Gaza is fundamentally political. It is intended to isolate the democratically-elected government of Palestine and break its power to resist Israeli attempts to impose an apartheid regime over the entire country.
This is why I, an Israeli Jew, felt compelled to join this voyage to break the siege. As a person who seeks a just peace with the Palestinians, who understands (despite what our politicians tell us) that they are not our enemies but rather people seeking precisely what we sought and fought for – national self-determination I cannot stand idly aside. I can no more passively witness my government’s destruction of another people than I can watch the Occupation destroy the moral fabric of my own country. To do so would violate my commitment to human rights, the very essence of prophetic Jewish religion, culture and morals, without which Israel is no longer Jewish but an empty, if powerful, Sparta.
Israel has, of course, legitimate security concerns, and Palestinian attacks against civilian populations in Sderot and other Israeli communities bordering on Gaza cannot be condoned. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel, as an Occupying Power, has the right to monitor the movement of arms to Gaza as a matter of “immediate military necessity.” As activists committed to resisting the siege non-violently, I have no objection to the Israeli navy boarding our boats and searching for weapons. But only that. Because Israel has no right to besiege a civilian population, it has no legal right to prevent us, private persons sailing solely in international and Palestinian waters, from reaching Gaza – particularly since Israel has declared that it no longer occupies it. Once the Israeli navy is convinced we pose no security threat, then, we thoroughly expect it to permit us to continue our peaceful and lawful journey into Gaza port.
Ordinary people have often played key roles in history, particularly in situations like this where governments shirk their responsibilities. My voyage to Gaza is a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people in their time of suffering, but it also conveys a message to my fellow citizens.
First, despite what our political leaders say, there is a political solution to the conflict, there are partners for peace, as evidenced by the Prisoner’s Document of 2006 in which all the Palestinian factions reaffirmed the principle of a negotiated settlement. The very fact that I, an Israeli Jew, will be welcomed by Palestinian Gazans makes that very point. My presence in Gaza also affirms that any resolution of the conflict must include all the peoples of the country, Palestinian and Israeli alike. I am therefore using whatever credibility my actions lend me to call on my government to renew genuine peace negotiations based on the Prisoners Document accepted by all Palestinian factions, including Hamas. The release of all political prisoners held by Israel, including Hamas government ministers and parliamentary members, in return for the repatriation of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, would dramatically transform the political landscape by providing the trust and good-will essential to any peace process.
Second, the Palestinians are not our enemies. In fact, I urge my fellow Israeli Jews to disassociate from the dead-end politics of our failed political leaders by declaring, in concert with Israeli and Palestinian peace-makers: We refuse to be enemies. Only that assertion of popular will can signal our government that we are fed up with being manipulated by those profiting from the Occupation.
And third, as the infinitely stronger party in the conflict and the only Occupying Power, we Israelis must accept responsibility for our failed and oppressive policies. Only we can end the conflict.
In the Israeli conception, Zionism was intended to return to the Jews control over their own destiny. Do not let us be held hostage to politicians who endanger the future of our society. Join with us end the siege of Gaza, and with it the Occupation in its entirety. Let us, the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, declare to our leaders: we demand a just and lasting peace in this tortured Holy Land.
(Jeff Halper, the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was a nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century
- Details
- Written by John Pilger John Pilger
- Published: 06 August 2008 06 August 2008
- Hits: 3685 3685
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims' names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
johnpilger.com
at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
johnpilger.com