Al-Ahram Weekly Online 15 - 21 November 2001 Issue No.560
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Turn on the lights

Sir- I was sailing along, reading Gamil Mattar's opinion column on the US image problems in the Arab world ("If looks could kill," Al-Ahram Weekly, 1-7 November), agreeing sadly with some of his comments and disagreeing mildly with others, until I came to his contention that the US has used "cluster bombs against civilians" in Afghanistan.

I must confess that as an American, I have been unaware of this tactic. I've been following the war in Afghanistan closely, and I have yet to hear of this development. Being an amateur student of military history, I'll have to look into the historical uses of cluster bombing innocent civilians and its merits, both from a military and public relations perspective. I'll drop my sarcasm now to point out the idiocy of the statement and the obvious bias it conveys.

And how could you possibly be "in the dark" about US military objectives in Afghanistan? They've been spelled out clearly and repeatedly. Do you not have access to modern media? The US is going after terrorists responsible for the mass murder of innocent people -- not just Americans, but people from dozens of different countries -- as well as those who harbour the murderers and make it possible for them to operate. President Bush, not one of my favourite people by the way, has said the war will last as long as it takes to root out the cockroaches responsible, and in this instance I support him wholeheartedly.

Lastly, these "legal and constitutional breaches" the US is perpetrating on a daily basis. Are you referring to the war? It isn't clear from your writing. If so, are you referring to the civilian lives lost? Again, if so, if you would be so kind to instruct me and President Bush how to conduct a war without the tragic loss of innocent lives? We would be most grateful to you. I believe it has never been done in human history, but perhaps you know something the rest of humanity does not.

You can criticise the US's lack of balanced policies toward your region, and I would agree with certain aspects of that argument and disagree with others. But, to make these outlandish accusations without hard evidence takes you out of the realm of journalism and into the realm of zealotry.

I've noticed that many -- not all -- Arabs who seem perfectly reasonable in other respects have a blind spot when it comes to the issue of Israel. Same for the Jews. I always considered this a fault, until 11 September. Now I can empathise, because I, like most Americans, have a blind spot when it comes to hunting down and exterminating Bin Laden and his treacherous followers. I promise you it will be done, no matter how long it takes.

Tim McDonald Lee
Florida
US

The US's use of cluster bombs on targets in Afghanistan -- which, as has widely been reported, include civilian targets -- is amply documented in the international media. For corroboration, see BBC News on 25 October ("Call for cluster bombs halt"), or the Human Rights Watch report of 31 October ("Afghanistan: US should stop using cluster bombs"), which notes: "During the first week of its campaign, it is believed that Air Force B-7 bombers dropped 50 CBU-87 cluster bombs in some five missions." On 25 October, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers admitted: "Yes, we have used cluster bomb units."

The Editor

Just like you and me

Sir- I just want to say I get quite a bit out of reading your site. Your perspective is very valuable to me. I don't necessarily agree with it (as I don't with perspectives here), but I find much light shed where I often have missed before. Yes, there's been quite a bit of "Arab-bashing" out here as a result of the fundamentalists in New York. The typical vain (and stupid!) people we can all so easily be. How ironic too: fundamentalists bomb us, and we go to church...

One thought I'd like to share: until we Americans (and probably everyone, eh?) get used to an "alien" culture, we almost always tend to dislike it. Look what happened to the Irish, the Italians, the Jews. Now they're accepted as regular people. I look forward to the time when we can say that about everyone... Arabs, Persians, Pakistanis included. Until then though, we'll have the inevitable jerks who, due to their own insecurities, will go out and hurt other groups. Please do keep in mind that America is evolving, and I see it mostly for the better. It's just unfortunate that we all have to wait...

Tom Gleason
California
US

The saviour's hand

Sir- I am sure you heard about the recent statement in which Osama Bin Laden alleged that East Timor was part of the Islamic world, and the UN peace-keepers (chiefly Australia) were guilty of invading Islamic territory when they came to put out the fire that TNI had lit in retaliation for the East Timorese deciding they weren't Indonesian after all.

Now with Indonesia teetering on the verge of break-up, and stretching an untried politician's cunning to the limit, we have a Saudi exile telling us he knows better than the East Timorese themselves, who merely lost a full third of their entire population due to the actions of TNI/ABRI dating from 7 December 1975, and the resulting deprivations.

And let us not forget the hundred or more thousand who are currently living in refugee camps in West Timor, in fear of the pro-Indonesia militia, and desperately wanting to return, but of whom the Indonesian government said at the time they were exiled under duress, that perhaps it should exile them further, spreading them throughout Indonesia.

Kind of like Palestine and the Nakba, or so it seems to me. Of course, I don't have the miraculous knowledge of an exiled Saudi dissident, who knows when to speak, in order to turn the several mujihadin in Indonesia into a fire that I suspect even Megawati's renowned father couldn't have put out. Because that is the threat of his words to the world's most populous Islamic nation.

If it hadn't been for my fury at the world's neglect and betrayal of the Timorese -- and the threat that it constitutes for Papua New Guinea, where I was born -- I would not now be equally furious at the world's neglect and betrayal of the Palestinians. And yes, if I hadn't wanted to punish Indonesia for its crimes against humanity in invading East Timor and using Irian Jaya to terrorise Papua New Guineans, I would not have picked up the few books about Palestine by the PLO in the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) Library.

I would like to say this to all the Islamic world, just so that they understand that Indonesia was uninvited in East Timor, like the Israelis in Palestine, and if they demand Palestinians' rights should be respected -- which I am in wholehearted agreement with -- then they should not dismiss other peoples' equal rights to live without harassment by an invading neighbour with superior military strength.

I am sorry if this comes across as anger at Al- Ahram Weekly. This is the only fully liberal Arab newspaper I know of, and I trust you not to take my anger the wrong way. And why should Australia's actions in preventing worse crimes by Muslims against Christians and, yes, against Muslims as well, be punished by Al-Qa'ida without a voice speaking for them? If murder is a crime, then it is a crime no matter who commits it, and Australia managed to restrict that terror to the extent that it did, instead of letting it consume the entire island. If premeditated murder is a sin against God, then the man who stays my hand is my saviour, not my oppressor.

Wesley Parish
Christchurch
New Zealand

I hope for peace

Sir- I find your paper very informative. I feel that it gives me a more balanced view rather than getting my news from a single source (i.e. US media). I learned quite a bit reading your paper, and it has opened my mind greatly. I will check your headlines again, to ensure that I do not become blinded by subjectivity.

Finally, I hope a Palestinian state comes to fruition, and I know Jewish people in America who feel the same. I hope... I hope many things, but overall it would be peace.

Heather Thompson
New Jersey
US

Upside down

Sir- Greetings from Brooklyn, New York, this little corner of the world. The bones of September have barely been interred, and new crises are already punching through the once hum- drum droppings of everyday life. Flying in an airplane; attending antiwar protests; wearing darker skin; praying to an unsanctioned God facing the wrong direction; even opening a letter -- all are filled with trepidation. The pervasive anxiousness is all-too-real.

As Allen Ginsberg once wrote: "We hug and kiss the United States under our bed sheets, the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep." There is a sense, not fully articulated, that at least some of the pervasive hysteria is being orchestrated, that our emotions are being manipulated, and that somewhere deep down a noisy little ulcer gnaws that this all may have something to do with Terrorism with a capital T, yes, but it also has something to do with Oil, with Pipeline, with Colony. Aladdin's lamps are exploding all at once, and Papa Bush's genetically engineered genies sweep down our chimneys at night when we are sleeping, jangling keys to apocalyptic dungeons lined with TV screens, we don't know why, and we don't have time to think about it as the next crisis is announced and is upon us just as earlier ones recede, wave after wave from sea to shining sea.

We are exhorted by mouths white with foam: "Support America. Go shopping." We purchase millions of American flags made in sweatshops in China to express our unity (and, for some, to say "Don't hit me, I'm a good guy too, not one of them"). We should be taking the opportunity to break off and think about who is stampeding us into returning to the routines we despised but which are now romanticised as "the good old days."

Peace is not a noun meaning the absence of war; it is a verb: "To Peace." To live as though the oneness is real (despite all the doubters, despite one's own doubts!). To live as though we still have rights. To understand that all soil is sacred even as the gaping anthraxial wound swallows up the biggest filing cabinets mankind has constructed -- Manhattan's two front teeth -- and we wait for some tooth fairy to exchange them for a quarter left under the pillow, this Autumn of our abandoned childhood.

How is it that the death count keeps getting less at Ground Zero -- the Washington Post has exhaustively tallied it at around half of what the mayor had been claiming, and getting smaller! -- and is getting higher, higher at someone else's Ground Zero the other side of the world? Is there a huge transfer of bodies through the dark channels of earth, some insane transmigration of souls from the spiritual desert of Wall Street to Afghanistan's flat earthly sands? Beyond right and wrong, beyond the political struggle to stop this bastard bombardment, beyond this and that, the harrowing dig through centuries of rubble to pull out real human lives; beyond the tarpits of civilisation, we charge through life like wounded dinosaurs fired up by avenging angels named General Electric and Lockheed and Boeing and Unocal, makers of both sides' instruments, their awful machinery of holocausts.

We are oblivious to -- or, if not oblivious, pushing aside -- the thought that we sit at the edge of World War III, about to extinct ourselves in Ginsberg's hydrogen jukebox in a place called Pakistan, called India, to see in whose God we trust the most, the one with the accurate Timex watch, cell phone, dialysis machine, and patch over one eye slaughtering the lambs or the accountant bookkeeper of capital with knotted white hair whose only prophets are profits, measuring abysmal teaspoons of justice for every abyssful of his believers' tortured souls. Said Camus: I wish I could love Justice and still love my country. We live in my country Tisofthee somewhere amidst the stars.

Bush's stolen election has put the whole world out of whack, threw us into a parallel universe that wasn't supposed to be, and everything that has transpired since -- the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gloria's cancer and death, the stolen dreams of real democracy -- pile jumbled on the ocean floor as the earth heats up, the seas rise around us, and, like the World Trade Center, swallow us whole.

Mitchel Cohen Bensonhurst
Brooklyn, New York
US

Conflict of interest

Sir- Shouldn't the "peaceful" people of Islam be policing one another? Peaceful Muslims know who and where the violent Muslims are. Many have been approached to join "the Brotherhood of Islam," have they not? Why are some Muslims resorting to insane violence while others hope and beg for anti-discrimination measures?

It seems some Muslims want rights and freedoms in the United States while using the very freedoms this country affords to combat innocent Americans. It is unfortunate where this has led, and more unfortunate where it will lead.

The extremist Muslims do not believe in coexistence, they openly desire to kill Americans. These are people who brought the problem here, because they could not win the fight in their land, they could not win the fight against their enemy. They wish to be heard, but will fall silent. They have no honour, they have no future, because they chose to make it so. It is tragic what they are doing to their own people and their own religion, they are ridiculous fools.

James David
Washington DC
US

Coke is it

Sir- As an American, I am thankful to have access to your weekly publication on the web. For more than 50 years, Americans, including those in power now, have imbibed their own propaganda and firmly believe in this country's unparalleled benevolence and fairness in dealing with other nations. George Bush appears on CNN nearly every day now insisting that America is "a kind nation, a fair nation, a generous nation." I can't recall witnessing this same level of propaganda in the US mass media. It has perhaps only been matched during the so-called "Gulf War" when flag-waving and Orwellian slogans were also commonplace.

Illustrating the average American's appalling ignorance of the effects of their own government's foreign policy, several programmes entitled "Why Do They Hate Us?" have been broadcast recently on television. These weak efforts have been largely drowned out by the immense volume of propaganda put out by the US government and the continual dissemination of the official views by the compliant US media.

As an example of this compliance, some weeks ago it sufficed that the White House made the "suggestion" that the spokesmen of Osama Bin Laden were sending covert messages in their televised statements through Al- Jazeera. Since this "suggestion" was made, no other statement has been picked up by CNN or any other station in the US. Is the US now in a better position to figure out "why they hate us" when the voices of discontent are effectively silenced? Al-Jazeera broadcasts are no longer carried on US media, including factual reporting about bombing of hospitals and other civilian loss of life in Afghanistan. America only hears the daily mantra of "attacking terrorism." Most Americans have no idea that the CIA supported and funded the Taliban, and in recent years hoped that American companies could build a pipeline through Afghanistan to get cheap oil out of Kazakhstan.

In light of this control of the American view of the world, I am quite pessimistic that America's stance towards the biggest terrorist state in the world -- Israel -- will change substantially. The US, England, and Israel will continue to use the word "terrorist" to suit their own goals, as your columnist Ibrahim Nafie points out in the "The very model of a rogue state" (Al-Ahram Weekly, 25-31 October).

I hope that Edward Said is correct in saying that the Al-Aqsa Intifada has universalised Arab and Muslim powerlessness. If this is the case, there is one powerful way to make America listen that does not need the involvement of corrupt organisations or governments: do not buy American (or English) goods or services. America's large corporate interests are the most powerful lobby in Washington, even more than the formidable AIPAC. If the average citizen wants to pursue an effective non-violent means to force the US listen, this is it. I can't help but think what would happen if all Muslims in the world stopped consuming Cokes and Pepsis for a year! Last night, I saw an image of Afghan "leaders" meeting in Pakistan to discuss their country's political future. Guess what they all had in their hands? A Pepsi!

F G Sanford
Los Angeles, California
US

Taking responsibility

Sir- I must ask if the author Hani Shukrallah understands the apologetics in his words ("What is terrorism?", Al-Ahram Weekly, 8-14 November) as he seeks to "explain" terrorism. Though I understand the necessity of such an explanation, perhaps Mr Shukrallah should address as well the issue of taking responsibility for one's own lives. His placing of blame on the "other," his justification for terrorism, paints the sufferers as eternally helpless victims with no recourse but revenge, as if the intentional killing of an enemy's innocents would serve to make the oppressed's lives better.

I fear such words are part of a constant tendency among Palestinian groups, and much of the Arab world, to blame without accepting responsibility. Such a strategy will not improve the lives of the oppressed. It will only provide a temporary feeling of satisfaction, of revenge, and will further dig the holes history has lain them in.

Jonathan Bonder
McGill University
Montreal
Canada

In search of legitimacy

Sir- UN Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373, unusually permissive, call on member states to work together to "bring to justice the perpetrators" of the 11 September attacks and to "take action" against them. But there is no doubt that the military campaign in Afghanistan has essentially to be run by the US. However, neither of the two resolutions has been translated into a specific resolution authorising the use of force

Although the UN is not well-equipped to run military operations, the impression that the organisation has been sidelined by the US is one of the central mistakes of the American-led (and British-supported) campaign against terrorism.

I wonder whether US is capable of putting right this illegitimate campaign.

Police Gen. (rtrd) Mohamed Mesbah
Maadi

Test of intentions

Sir- I was really intrigued by Edward Said's article ("Adrift in similarity," Al-Ahram Weekly, 11-17 October). One thing that you have to consider is that prior to 11 September, the Palestinian plight was a big concern in many editorial pages of American newspapers. This was especially true in right-wing areas of the US.

One major point will be in finding Arab financial backing for the purchase of properties in disputed regions and whether these overtures are considered. This will be a telling factor in whether either or both the Arab and Israeli sides are willing to look for a solution. If there are parties blocking this progress, I hope that the individual pockets of resistance are looked at, instead of a condemnation of either or both sides. I hope that progress can be made soon. If not, Americans, and please do not throw any Zionist implication at us, may soon feel that nobody in your region has the capacity to find peace.

Thank you (I really enjoy your publication).

Greg Smith
Long Beach, California
US

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