Poll: 10% of Palestinian children have lasting malnutrition effects

Last update - 21:02 11/04/2007

By The Associated Press

About 10 percent of Palestinian children suffer permanent effects from malnutrition, according to a survey published Wednesday, a result of widespread poverty in the West Bank and Gaza.

The root cause is poverty, according to Khaled Abu Khaled, who directed the study for the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. He said the numbers are up slightly over the past two years.

"One obvious effect of malnutrition is stunted growth among children, which has increased about three percent in the last two years," he said.

"This is a chronic chronic. Even with interventions, the rates don't go down fast," he said.

Other surveys have shown that about half of the Palestinians are living in poverty.

Six years of violence between Palestinians and Israelis have crippled economic growth in the West Bank and Gaza. A year of international aid sanctions following an election victory by the Islamic Hamas and its takeover of the Palestinian government has intensified the hardships.

The findings were based on a survey conducted in November and December covering 13,238 residents of the West Bank and Gaza, according to a statement. It found that 13.2 percent of the children of Gaza suffer stunted growth, compared to 7.9 percent in the West Bank.

While incidents of stunted growth were up slightly, Abu Khaled noted a decrease in cases of extremely low body weight - another common symptom of acute malnutrition. He said the children of northern Gaza were most likely to suffer stunted growth as well as low birth weight.

The survey showed that 17 percent of the Palestinian population is made up of children under the age of five, and 46 percent are under 15.

Palestinian hope held hostage

Economic sanctions are keeping Palestinians from building a life.

By Salam Fayyad, SALAM FAYYAD is the minister of finance in the Palestinian unity government.

March 31, 2007

TWO WEEKS AGO, I became the minster of finance for a people whose economy has all but collapsed. It was the start of business for the new Palestinian unity government, born after months of tricky on-again, off-again negotiations and amid economic sanctions, bloodshed and misery.

The government came together after a bad year for the struggling Palestinian Authority. Our economic difficulties grew much worse during that period, in the aftermath of a free and fair election that brought Hamas to power. Because Hamas' political platform did not conform to key elements of the peace process, including Palestinian recognition of Israel's right to exist and a commitment to renounce violence, the international community imposed sanctions on the Palestinian Authority.

Although much of the discussion leading to the formation of the unity government has focused on these two commitments, their validity should not have been much in question. After all, these commitments were made by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, in a crystal-clear and binding agreement in 1993, and no Palestinian government has the authority to revoke them. In fact, the unity government's platform explicitly states that it will honor all PLO agreements, which, to be sure, include these two commitments.

As someone who has long worked for peace and reconciliation with Israel — a peace based on mutual recognition of each people's rights — I have always subscribed to the PLO's political program and all the commitments it embodies, including the recognition of Israel's right to exist and the renunciation of violence. I still do. My top priority is to lead the effort to end the economic sanctions and to restore the integrity of our public finance system.

A harsh and painful year after the onset of the sanctions, staggering poverty and unemployment rates prevail. Today, almost two-thirds of the Palestinian population lives in poverty, with per-capita income at 60% of its level in 1999. But as Thomas Jefferson said: "If we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair." As a Palestinian, I have a duty to hope and to work tirelessly to make the dreams of my people a reality.

We Palestinians dream of living normal lives. We dream of an end to the days when Palestinian farmers in the West Bank watch their crops destroyed to make way for Israeli-only roads, an end to the days when Palestinian children must brave Israeli military checkpoints to get to school and an end to the days when Gaza's 1.4 million Palestinians are sealed inside their territory, cut off from the rest of the world. Like all people, we deserve freedom in our own land. We deserve democratic, transparent and accountable institutions. And we deserve to live in peace and economic cooperation with all our neighbors, including Israel.

Over the years, the international community has encouraged and supported Palestinians in building democratic institutions to serve as the foundation of our future state. Donor assistance helped pay for the building of schools, hospitals and roads in addition to supporting good governance and providing the know-how to create a functioning administration.

In my previous term as finance minister, from June 2002 to December 2005, I played a leading role in establishing transparency and accountability in government finances through the introduction of a series of deep, wide-ranging reforms that helped bring our public finance system up to international standards. These included the consolidation of all government revenues in the Ministry of Finance, the elimination of extra-budgetary spending and the regular publication of detailed financial statements.

Since the international sanctions were imposed, aid has continued to flow, which has helped prevent starvation. But by channeling funds so that they bypass the Ministry of Finance, donors have unintentionally contributed to reversing these institution-building gains. The money coming in can no longer be traced, and we cannot ensure that it is not being misappropriated.

Also, our dependence on foreign-aid handouts is increasing while our economic development is stifled. In 2005, for example, only 16% of European Union aid to Palestine was classified as humanitarian. Last year, that figure rose to 56%.

We do not aspire to be a beggar nation, dependent on the world to feed our people. We have the capacity, education and talent to build a thriving economy and a strong democracy. But we cannot do so while Israel seals our borders and withholds tax revenue it owes us, or while U.S. banking regulations prevent banks from handling government business.

In order that we may begin again to develop the institutions and systems that will make us self-reliant and that will buttress the foundation of our future state, the sanctions must be lifted.

The U.S. has long acknowledged — as has the entire world community — that the formation of a viable, independent Palestinian state on the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip is the way out of this nearly 60-year-old conflict. But until the international community demonstrates the political will to help bring about a comprehensive settlement — one that will grant Palestinians the freedom to build our own economy and institutions in our own land — we will all continue to pay the price. Despair will continue to erode hope. And, lest we forget the words of Jefferson, hope is indeed "as cheap, and pleasanter."

The west may yet come to regret bullying of Russia

Putin has no interest in a new cold war and is struggling to modernise his economy. Yet he is rebuffed and insulted

Simon Jenkins in Moscow
Wednesday February 21, 2007
The Guardian

Countries too have feelings. So I am told by a Russian explaining the recent collapse in relations between Vladimir Putin and his one-time western admirers. "We have done well in the past 15 years, yet we get nothing but rebuffs and insults. Russia's rulers have their pride, you know."

The truth is that Putin, like George Bush and Tony Blair, has an urgent date with history. He can plead two terms as president in which he has stabilised, if not deepened, Russian democracy, forced the pace of economic modernisation, suppressed Chechen separatism and yet been remarkably popular. But leaders who dismiss domestic critics crave international opinion, and are unaccustomed to brickbats. Hence Putin's outburst at the Munich security conference this month, when he announced he would "avoid extra politesse" and speak his mind.

Putin's apologists ask that he be viewed as victim of an epic miscalculation by the west. Here is a hard man avidly courted at first by Bush, Blair and other western leaders. After 9/11 he tolerated US intervention along his southern border with bases north of Afghanistan. Yet when he had similar trouble in Chechnya, he was roundly abused. When he induced Milosevic to leave Kosovo (which he and not "the bombing" did), he got no thanks.

When Putin sought to join Nato in the 1990s he was rebuffed. Then Nato broke its post-cold-war promise and advanced its frontier through the Baltics and Poland to the Black Sea. It is now planning missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic and is flirting with Ukraine and Georgia. Against whom is this directed, asks Putin.

The west grovels before Opec, but when Putin proposes a gas Opec it cries foul. America seizes Iraq's oil, but when Putin nationalises Russia's oil that, too, is a foul. Meanwhile, every crook, every murdered Russian, every army scandal is blazoned across the western press. True, Russia is still a klepto-oligarchy that steps back as often as forward, but what of America's pet Asian democracies, Afghanistan and Iraq?

In his Munich speech Putin asked why America constantly goes on about its "unipolar world". Does Washington really seek a second cold war? Russia is withdrawing from Georgia and Moldova. Why is Nato advancing bases in Bulgaria and Romania? The west is handling Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran with the arrogance and ineptitude of 19th-century imperialists. Is it surprising Russia is seeking allies where it can, in China, India, Iran and the Gulf?

At an Anglo-Russian conference in Moscow last weekend I was bemused by the talk of a return to "east-west" confrontation. Diplomats have a habit of listing complaints like marriage counsellors inviting couples to catalogue what most irritates them about each other. The list seems endless, but it surely points to a proper talk rather than a divorce. Don't they really need each other after all?

Having visited Russia three times since the demise of the Soviet Union, I remain impressed by its progress. Debate and comment are open. Russia is not squandering its energy wealth but setting $100bn aside in an infrastructure fund. The links between Russia and western business are worth $30bn in inward investment. Cultural and educational contacts are strengthening. Moscow and St Petersburg are booming world cities, their skylines thick with cranes.

The west views pluralist democracy as so superior that any state coming to it fresh must surely welcome it with open arms. When there is backsliding, as in former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Russia and parts of Africa, let alone the Arab world, the west behaves like a peevish car salesman whose client has not obeyed the repair manual. If the west can do fair elections, market capitalism, press freedom and regional secession - after a mere two centuries of trial and error - why can newly free states not do them overnight?

The tough response to Putin is easy. It is the one he has from Washington and Nato. We won the cold war. You lost. Shut up. If, as Russia's top general said last week, you want to withdraw from the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, then withdraw. If you think gas and oil enables you to play the superpower again, see what happens. Bush and Blair may be screwing up "Islamistan", but their successors will be more canny. Our defence budget is bigger than yours and we have you surrounded.

All this makes for good realpolitik. But what Putin actually said in Munich reflected not belligerence but puzzlement at the aggressive course of western diplomacy. In the old days, he said, "there was an equilibrium and a fear of mutual destruction. In those days one party was afraid to make an extra step without consulting the others. This was certainly a fragile peace and a frightening one, but seen from today it was reliable enough. Today it seems that peace is not so reliable."

Putin is hardly seeking a return to the certainties of the cold war. He has no more interest than the west in stirring the hornet's nest of Islamic nationalism, stretching as it does deep into Russian territory. His desire for "ever closer union" with Europe and Nato after 1997 was sincere and was surely welcome.

While Putin appears to have been conducting his diplomacy over the past decade from weakness and the west from strength, the reverse has been nearer the truth. Britain and America have been led by essentially reactive politicians with no grasp of history. A terrorist outrage or a bombastic speech and they change policy on the hop. When Bush and Blair go, they will leave a world less secure and more divided in its leadership than when they arrived. Their dismissive treatment of Russia's recovery from cold war defeat has been the rhetoric of natural bullies.

Russia and the west have everything to gain from good relations. Putin has struggled to modernise his economy while holding together a traumatised and shrunken Russian federation. The west may feel he errs towards authoritarianism, but second-guessing Russian leaders is seldom a profitable exercise. This is a huge country, rich in natural and human resources. It is hard to think of somewhere the west would be better advised to "hug close". Instead, Putin will hand his successor an isolated and bruised nation. Under a less confident president, it could retreat into protectionism and alliances the west will hate. To have encouraged that retreat is truly stupid.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes a column twice weekly for the Guardian and weekly for the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC. Previously he wrote columns for the Times and the London Evening Standard, both of which newspapers he edited. His career began on Country Life magazine and continued on the Times Educational Supplement, the Economist (political editor) and the Sunday Times (books editor). He served on the board of British Rail and London Transport in the 80s and was deputy chairman of English Heritage and a Millennium commissioner. He was Journalist of the Year in 1988 and Columnist of the Year in 1993. His books include works on London architecture, the press and politics and, more recently, England's Thousand Best Churches (1999) and Thousand Best Houses (2003).

Poll: Muslim-West divide can be bridged

Feb. 18, 2007, 6:22PM

By D'ARCY DORAN Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

LONDON — A majority of people around the world do not believe the world is locked in a "clash of civilizations" that will lead to violent conflict between Islam and the West, according to findings of a poll published Monday.

The British Broadcasting Corp. World Service poll of more than 28,000 people found that 56 percent of respondents believed "common ground can be found" between Muslims and Westerners, while only 28 percent said violence was inevitable.

The survey also found that 52 percent of people believed that tensions between Muslims and Westerners were caused by political power and interests, compared to 29 percent who said religion and culture were to blame.

The poll was conducted for the BBC by the international polling firm GlobeScan and the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

Pollsters questioned about 1,000 people in 27 different countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Australia; as well as four predominantly Muslim countries: Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia; and two countries with large Muslim populations: Lebanon and Nigeria.

The respondents were interviewed in person and over the phone from November to mid-January. The margin of error ranges from 2.5 percent to 4 percent, depending on the country.

Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, countries around the world have struggled with how to deal with Islamic radicalism at home and abroad. The poll's results are hopeful, given they show most people believe differences between Muslims and Westerners can be worked out, said Steven Kull, director of PIPA at the University of Maryland.

"Most people around the world clearly reject the idea that Islam and the West are caught in an inevitable clash of civilizations," he said.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents blamed tensions on intolerant minorities — not cultural groups as a whole. But 26 percent identified fundamental differences between the cultures as the root cause.

In Britain, 77 percent of people believed common ground could be found between Muslims and Westerners, compared to 15 percent who saw violence as inevitable. In the U.S., 64 percent believed in common ground, but 31 percent saw conflict as inevitable.

Overall, 52 percent of the 5,000 Muslims surveyed said common ground was possible, including majorities in Lebanon (68 percent) and Egypt (54 percent), as well as pluralities in Turkey (49 percent) and the United Arab Emirates (47 percent).

Only in Indonesia did a majority (51 percent) believe that violence was inevitable.

Worldwide, Muslims were slightly more certain than Christians that tensions derive from political conflict, at 55 percent compared to 51 percent.

___

On the Net:

http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbciswest/

The Mecca agreement gives the west the chance to end its blackmail and recognise Palestinian rights

Our unity can now pave the way for peace and justice

Khalid Mish'al
Tuesday February 13, 2007
The Guardian

A historic new phase in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence has begun. Last week's Mecca agreement between Hamas and Fatah will pave the way for the first ever truly Palestinian national unity government. Hamas and Fatah, joined by all the other Palestinian factions, will now seek to rebuild Palestinian society following the destruction brought upon it by Israeli occupation and resume the campaign for our national rights.

We are determined to make sure that the recent internal fighting, which appalled our people and dismayed their supporters around the world, becomes history. We firmly believe that it would never have happened had it not been for foreign intervention and the brutal sanctions imposed on our people by Israel and its allies. The crisis would not have existed had international and regional powers respected the results of last year's democratic elections in Palestine.

The Mecca agreement has laid the foundations for a power-sharing process that will produce a functioning government capable of attending to our people's needs. It will also pave the way for rebuilding the PLO to include all the factions and become the legitimate representative of all Palestinian people. The partnership born out of the Mecca meeting is possible because of the consensus among the Palestinians that their primary objective is to win their freedom, and that their struggle should be solely against occupation. It is now up to the international community to respect this accord and the will of the Palestinian people.

We Palestinians have been the victims of invasion, occupation and oppression for almost a century. Yet we have been constantly blackmailed to make concessions and give up yet more of our legitimate rights. Since the elections of January 2006 our people have been boycotted and punished by the international community for exercising their democratic rights. In the meantime, Israel has continued to kill and detain Palestinians on a daily basis, demolishing hundreds of houses and making thousands homeless.

Today Israel has more than 11,000 of our brothers and sisters in jail and continues to deny millions of refugees the right to return to their homeland. It has defied international law by proceeding with the construction of the apartheid wall and building settlements on land expropriated from Palestinians. Meanwhile, excavation resumed last week in the compound of al-Aqsa mosque, and on Friday the mosque, to which access is denied to Palestinians below the age of 45, was invaded by Israeli troops who wounded scores of worshippers.

Now that Hamas and Fatah have agreed to form a national unity government, the international community has no excuse to maintain the siege against our people. We know that many governments around the world are unhappy with these sanctions and want to see an end to them. The Palestinian national accord achieved in Mecca envisages the establishment of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in June 1967 - with Jerusalem as its capital, the dismantling of the settlements in the West Bank, the release of all Palestinian prisoners and the acknowledgement of the right of the refugees to return to their homes.

Once translated into reality, this vision will pave the way for real peace in the region. There must be no more blackmail of Palestinians, for there is nothing else they can give away. Global powers should have learned by now that neither sanctions nor any other form of pressure or bribery will force the Palestinians to abandon their struggle for freedom and independence.

All previous peace proposals have failed because they were intended to impose an unjust pro-Israel settlement on our people, and were based on the assumption that the Palestinian struggle was a form of terrorism that the Palestinians had to renounce. The attempt to divide Palestinians into moderates and extremists or peacemakers and terrorists has failed. Now we are united in our determination to seek an end to oppression and occupation.

So, will the international community seize this historic opportunity, require Israel to respect our rights and stop hindering this attempt to turn the Palestinian national agreement into a reality? Or will it remain weak and ineffective in the face of Israeli intransigence and risk alienating not only Hamas but also Fatah and all the other Palestinian factions?

If the latter is the choice, the outcome will be dire indeed: the entire Middle East region will be driven towards another cycle of bloody escalation that may last for many years to come - and an entire Palestinian generation, which might not be willing to accept what we accept today, will be left profoundly embittered.

The west needs to wake up and realise that time is no longer on the side of Israel and its policies of occupation, destruction and expansion. Time no longer favours the continuation of policies biased towards Israel. It will not serve the best interests of the west to support Israel while it continues to terrorise our people, occupy our land, violate our basic human and national rights and encroach on Muslim and Christian holy places. Such blind support has proven to be very costly for the west and will increasingly damage its vital interests.

It must be understood by all that the people of Palestine have the key to both peace and war in the Middle East. There can never be peace and stability in the region without settling the Palestinian question. And that can only be achieved by ending the occupation and recognising our people's rights.

· Khalid Mish'al is head of the Hamas political bureau

khmishal@gmail.com

The outside world has to grasp that Palestinian infighting is the product of an intolerable blockade

We are being suffocated

Sami Abdel-Shafi in Gaza City
Saturday February 10, 2007
The Guardian

It was a surreal but telling reflection of how lonely Palestinians have become as their leadership has seemingly been pushed into breakdown and failure, while Israel watched from the sidelines. Late one night, I was suddenly yelled at to stop my car, turn the lights off and roll down the windows. Two masked men, without any identifying insignias, closed in from the sides; one pointed his machine gun at me while the other, two steps behind, shouldered a loaded rocket-propelled grenade launcher. That was a week last Thursday, hours after fierce clashes erupted between Hamas and Fatah, ending the seventh ceasefire between the factions, and ushering in the deadliest power struggle yet.

To Palestinians it seemed sadly clear that the moral credit of their cause was being eroded: how must it look to the outside world that they had flip-flopped in one year between democratic elections and internecine violence?

A day before this incident, a House of Commons development committee report warned of drastically deteriorating conditions in the occupied territories as a result of the US-led economic embargo in the wake of last year's elections. The report questioned the proportionality of Israel's own blockade and its implications for the prospects of a lasting peace. The Palestinian infighting only underlined the sense of those warnings.

The militiamen I had run into had no clear lines of authority. One turned out to be a recent accountancy graduate who had never been able to find a job and had been given no weapons training. Many such armed men simply need an income. Without any means to provide for their families, they join one of the many security outfits to secure a salary. The international community needs to grasp the dire consequences of maintaining what is the largest regional prison in the world: Camp Gaza Strip.

Thursday's agreement between the leaders of Fatah and Hamas in Mecca has contained the conflict and Gaza is now calm. But as Palestinians resumed constructive dialogue, Israel employed its classic approach of shifting the pressure between Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem. For Israel to have begun an inflammatory dig at one of the entrances to the holy city of old Jerusalem - on the first day of the talks in Mecca - was clearly not without calculation. Yesterday, the morning after the Palestinian agreement had been reached, Israeli forces attacked Jerusalemites protesting at the project and barred Muslims from the al-Aqsa mosque.

Despite all this, the Quartet (the group, consisting of the US, EU, UN and Russia, entrusted with advancing Palestinian-Israeli peace) still appears unable to accept that no positive developments can be hoped for as long as the Gaza Strip remains sealed off, or the West Bank wall continues to be built. The current stance of the US and the EU is in practice an endorsement of Israel's policy of blockading the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, and gobbling up West Bank and east Jerusalem territory. This can only guarantee the flight of the very people the international community says it counts on to forge peace: Palestinian "moderates".

It is one thing for the Quartet to demand a Palestinian rejection of violence, but unless pressure is brought to bear on Israel to release its military grip from the Palestinian territories - which long predates the election of Hamas - it will suffocate Palestinian hope and show that the world is only chasing a phantom of peace. No political initiative can compensate the suppression of an entire people's potential to develop in freedom.

· Sami Abdel-Shafi is the co-founder of Emerge Consulting Group, a management consultancy in Gaza City

A Peace Initiative For The Progeny Of Abraham

Jan 26, 2007

By Dr Tayyaba Qidwai

The Year 2005 and the month of September of that year, is going to resonate in the corridors of history, with the shrill cry of something momentous – it was a cry of anguish of Abrahamic civilization itself, when two of the great cultures of this century prepared to clash on a fundamental issue. According to some, it may have been a war cry as well. No guns or swords were drawn; what was drawn were a series of cartoons, by something mightier – a Pen! In fact they were pens of 12 innocuous artists.

“ Jyllands-Posten and the other western media organs, which supported the offending Danish newspaper, missed one great factor. This is for the first time in human history that the world today is living under one ethnic civilization of two shades and if this civilization collapses there is no fresh civilizational idea immediately available to humanity to re-enact the feat of the seventh century. In the Orient it is the mature but reflexive Islamic Civilization manifest in many regional cultures thriving from Senegal to Indonesia, with some significant outposts in western democracies. In the Occident, it is the accomplished Judeo-Christian Civilization similarly rooted in history and directing an unprecedented technological advancement. It has greatly influenced the regions beyond its home bases.

These were the thoughts, which prompted Tariq Ghazi to write his book. He captured the kaleidoscopic events preceding and following that lament, in a fascinating, perceptive commentary called The Cartoons Cry. When the future generations get to know about the infamous cartoons controversy started by a little known newspaper in "a quiet place in a calm Nordic city", the same corridors would reverberate with the names of such historians, who were perceptive enough to hear that cry and record it for posterity.

For a layperson, who observes the current world events with interest, yet confusion, Ghazi's deeply insightful book provides a clear and accessible study of the mindset of the two major cultures of this era, heading onto a possible collision course according to some astute observers. The Cartoons Cry also draws valuable intuitive guidelines on how that catastrophe can be averted and civilization salvaged.

For readers like me it provided an invaluable insight into a culture, which I share with the author and the maturity needed to stimulate us, for charting out a better future for our grandchildren.

It also provides an unusually perceptive introduction to the West, of a parallel culture descending from Abraham, the common ancestor.

“… Both Islamic and Western Civilizations are in need of ‘challenges’ to jump-start them. .... The two civilizations are original in their thought process and innovative in application of social ideals. The two have freely borrowed from each other, but accepted only what withstood the test of their critical appreciation. The two civilizations also have a long history of conflict and compromise, antipathy and interaction, highlighting a unique relationship that has no parallel in human history. This disposition puts them shoulder-to-shoulder on the same high pedestal of originality and creativity, as compared to other civilizations.”

It would have been a difficult task for the author to tell everything in an honest, yet non-confrontational way. But, it goes to his credit that he took this challenge, minutely researched the subject from worldwide news sources and then penned it, with the confident authority of a veteran journalist, a perceptive social scientist and political analyst.

It is a deftly woven account of the events which eventually led to the two cultures standing face to face for confrontation. On one side was the defense of right of freedom of expression and on the other the fundamental right of respect for religion. It is perhaps no accident that the author personifies both sides – as a journalist and as a practicing Muslim. Like a responsible peace-negotiator, he takes up the task to bring them both together at the negotiating table and provides them the option to choose.

“… the question always confronting the three Sethic-Semitic religions is which side they stand on – are they with Abel and Seth or with Cain? Are they with Noah or with his detractors who opted to be perished by The Flood, with Abraham or with the wicked king of Babylon who tried to burn the latter alive, with Moses or with the pharaoh, with David or with Goliath, with Jesus or with Pilate, with Muhammad or with Abu Jahl?”

The book, at the narrative plain, is a mirror of the historical, social, political, economic and judicial parameters of the international community of the current century.

Democracy – with all its fundamental rights of equality and justice, is also "law is will of the people. The Westerner finds legal ways to circumvent laws, biblical or temporal, and legalizes their diversion through democratic process."


The young people in the West – "worship the symbols of total freedom – free from any form of religious, moral, social or political restrictions “. But, national leaders and the clergy are definitely not their role models.

The Muslims, on the other hand, are seen as a people distinguished by their religious behavior, earning them the sobriquets – from fundamentalists and practicing to moderates, seculars and liberals.

As immigrants, Ghazi feels, Muslims have had nothing to offer to their host countries, as a result they are "there to emulate, to copy, to ape everything their new nation offers, thus encouraging their hosts to demand more assimilation and acceptance of western values, rather than showing respect to the uniqueness of the guests."

The relationship between the powerful and the weak in our times: The powerful and mighty oppressing the weak with sanctions and warring tactics.

The weak trying dialogue, peaceful demonstrations and boycotts initially, but finally resorting to violent tactics when "nobody listens".

The Cartoons Cry gives very informative historical background into the origins of such violent tactics as bounty on the head, burning of effigies, burning of national flags. These are not originally Islamic ways of protest, but have been taken up by excitable minority on the promptings of scheming politicians. The author feels that it is the duty of Muslim social scientists and the media to tell them about the un-Islamic nature of these practices.

It advises, the resort to legal procedures, which is one of the common meeting ground for both the cultures. The Islamic ruling for justice which is based on equal retribution to the original injury and no more, but may be less or forgiven entirely, is an eye-opener for not only Western society but Muslims as well.

Above all, it is a labor of love. Ghazi’s love and reverence for that person shines through, the denigration of whose dignity has probably motivated him to write the book in the first place. In words of devotion and respect he affectionately draws out the personality of Muhammad Rasool-Allah (saw), the Prophet of Islam, and shows how an attack on such a revered personality is likely to disturb the emotional stability of about 1.5 billion of his followers, because they love him more than their own selves. Infact, he shows his love and respect for All the Prophets .

“Muslims do not understand why common Christians fail to react to frequent insults to Jesus Christ. On the other hand, Jesus – as also everyone of the prophets right from Adam to Noah, Abraham, Lot, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Job, Jonah, Elijah, Elisha – is so loved by the Muslims that they wouldn’t refer to anyone of them without saluting each of them with the phrase ‘alaih is-salam’, meaning ‘peace be upon him’. …”

The book demands serious study, particularly by the young generation of all faith communities, and also needs to be preserved in libraries for the important historical contribution it is going to make to the global human community.

The Cartoons Cry is a call for a firm handshake between the children of Abraham. He hopes the Creative Minority of Muslims who have migrated to the West, would be the first to extend their hand.


"The Cartoons Cry" (ISBN: 9781425947644), by Muhammad Tariq Ghazi, can be ordered directly from the publisher at www.AuthorHouse.com for$11.90 ($3.95 for electronic edition). It can be purchased from Barnes and Noble, Amazon and other bookstores at $13.49.

Life in Gaza -- an account by a Gazan doctor

With Mona El-Farra, Mohammed Omer, and Amira Hass
KALW Your Call
December 28, 2006

Commentary: Pathetic questions by a silly California interviewer... "what can't you buy in the supermarket..."

Overview of what is happening in Gaza...

Robert Fisk: He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him

Robert Fisk

How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies', equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't squeal

Published: 31 December 2006

We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.

Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.

"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments - thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"

I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time, under Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week. The commander of that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armour. Two years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers called him "General" - the rank awarded him by Saddam after that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's intelligence information.

Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981. AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. "We started counting - we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting," he said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination - the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies ... the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they spat blood."

At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America's complicity in this atrocity remain secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this period - although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax, andEscherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report concluded that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including ... chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment."

Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical weapons. In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his personal permission for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer - one of 60 American officers who were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb damage assessments - to visit the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town from the Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later said that the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis "was not a matter of deep strategic concern".

I saw the results, however. On a long military hospital train back to Tehran from the battle front, I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their lungs - the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the windows - and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No wonder that Saddam was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter of Shia villagers, not for his war crimes against Iran.

We still don't know - and with Saddam's execution we will probably never know - the extent of US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982. The initial tranche, the sum of which was spent on the purchase of American weapons from Jordan and Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987, Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit. By 1990, just before Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US had grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker then Secretary of State, but the same James Baker who has just produced a report intended to drag George Bush from the catastrophe of present- day Iraq - pushed for new guarantees worth $1bn from the US.

In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert military assistance to Saddam guaranteed £250m to Iraq shortly after the arrest of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who had been investigating an explosion at a factory at Hilla which was using the very chemical components sent by the US, was later hanged. Within a month of Bazoft's arrest William Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, said: "I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well-placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly... A few more Bazofts or another bout of internal oppression would make it more difficult."

Even more repulsive were the remarks of the then Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing controls on British arms sales to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote, because "it would look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".

Saddam knew, too, the secrets of the attack on the USS Stark when, on 17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched a missile attack on the American frigate, killing more than a sixth of the crew and almost sinking the vessel. The US accepted Saddam's excuse that the ship was mistaken for an Iranian vessel and allowed Saddam to refuse their request to interview the Iraqi pilot.

The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.

'The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East' by Robert Fisk is now available in paperback

The proxy war in Palestine

by Anisa Abd el Fattah

(Wednesday December 20 2006)

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"The Palestinian people, like most of the Arab and Muslim people of the region, old and young alike, are tired of business and life as it has been, and they have repeatedly cast their votes for change, and a leadership that will use the truth as a power, like others had used lies and tricks and double talk to make themselves rich and powerful men, celebrated by Israel and the West as peacemakers, having traded the freedom and lives of their people for a pat on the head, and a photo op."

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The new strategy being employed to militarily defeat the Islamic movements in the Arab/Muslim world is not really a new strategy. It is an old strategy being employed in a new venue. It is a strategy that until now seemed to favor Israel, since Israel has the most powerful proxies in the region, the United States and Britain who both entered the war in Iraq to advance Israel’s geo-political interests, and also to secure a source of reliable energy for Israel that would either originate in Iraq, or be piped through some part of Iraq into Israel. The war between Israel and Hizbollah was another rendition of that same strategy without the oil interest. In this instance, the proxy war saw some adjustments that left Israel pretty much on its own against Hizbollah, since the US and Britain couldn’t find any believable pretense like WMD or regime change under which to engage Hizbollah militarily on behalf of Israel, and so Israel had to fight for itself, while the US and Britain provided legal cover and weapons for Israel’s illegal onslaught against both the Palestinian and Lebanese people, an onslaught that left Lebanon peppered with illegal cluster bombs, and resulted in another illegal and immoral massacre of innocent unarmed Palestinians by Israel. Considering the proxies and the players in the Israeli v. Hizbollah and Palestine war, and also in the Iraq war, anyone asked to pick a winner, would have likely put their money on Israel and its fellowship of tyrants and warmongers, the US and Britain, and they would have lost their bets. Anyone betting today on Abbas in Palestine, will loose that bet too.

Unfortunately, Israel and its proxies are unrepentant following their defeat in Lebanon and their pending defeat in Iraq. Frustrated by their continued failure to undermine the duly elected Palestinian government, and still belligerent and convinced that militarism is the only solution to all problems, Israel and its league of dishonorable proxies have now sought to create a civil war that pits the Palestinians against one another in a classic proxy war that is aimed at defeating the growing influence of Iran in the region, and to restore their lost aura of invincibility and also what the secular nationalists lost in bragging rights to Iran, Hizbollah, and Hamas, and their loss of face that resulted from the UN General Assembly’s official condemnation of Israel, that overrode the now impotent US veto, cast in the UN Security Council to shield Israel from the condemnation it earned and deserved as a result of its brutal, and illegal military assaults on Lebanon and Palestine.

Just as in Iraq, Israel and its lackeys, including their Arab worshippers, are pursuing a divide and conquer strategy in Palestine, which could possibly engulf the entire region in a sectarian war not fought along religious lines, but rather along ideological lines. The media loves to offer up the Sunni/Shia divide as the primary weakness to exploit in the Arab/Muslim world by those who use differences to foment hate and war. The real divide between Fatah and Hamas is ideological, and it symbolizes the difference between those like Iran who do not believe that the US and Israel should dominate, subjugate and dictate the future of the region, and its people, and those who have become so accustomed to being well paid stooges of the US and Israel, that no other possibility except servitude seems either feasible, or reasonable to them, and so they cast their lots against their fellow Arabs and Muslims, fearing Iran more than they fear Israel, even though Iran has never slaughtered their people to ethically cleanse them from their land, targeted and killed their leaders, confiscated their land, robbed their banks or forced any of their people into refugee camps to languish for years, barely surviving. In fact, Iran, almost more than any other Muslim country, put everything on the line for the sake of Palestine, determined to break Israel’s psychological and material choke hold on the region that has left it economically, spiritually and politically fatigued, being pushed back and forth through periods of either intense and brutal Israeli violence, or quite US, British and Israeli political gamesmanship and subterfuge designed to undermine the fragile democratic institution that was set up in Palestine to legitimize the PLO as a negotiating partner for Israel, hoping to create the illusion of a negotiated agreement between the two parties that was really only a paid capitulation by an illegitimate PLO, brought back to the territories from exile to replace a newly founded Hamas movement that had spawned a militant resistance more fierce than anything the secular nationalist PLO had ever dreamed of, and a nightmare for Israel and its patrons in the West.

When the people of Palestine voted Hamas into power, and rejected the PA corruption and capitulation to Israel that caused a bloody uprising that resulted in the Jenin massacre, the Palestinian people sent a message to the west more profound, and more powerful than anything ever dictated by Israel at the negotiating table. They said that they were no longer afraid, and no longer willing to roll over to the status quo, or to be sacrificed on the political altars of the Arab elite. The Palestinian people, like most of the Arab and Muslim people of the region, old and young alike, are tired of business and life as it has been, and they have repeatedly cast their votes for change, and a leadership that will use the truth as a power, like others had used lies and tricks and double talk to make themselves rich and powerful men, celebrated by Israel and the West as peacemakers, having traded the freedom and lives of their people for a pat on the head, and a photo op. That the other Arab governments have now come out openly to oppose democracy in Palestine, and to undermine the legitimate and duly elected government, is nothing new to the people of the region who have always known that the occupation could never have lasted as long as it has without Arab support, and that Israel would not continue to attempt to drive the Palestinians from the occupied territories without an agreement with some Arab nation or nations, to take them in and assume responsibility for them, just like they invaded Iraq with the hope of using Jordan as a proxy authority to govern what they had hoped would be a broken and vulnerable Iraq. Just as the US transitional authority under Paul Bremer either knowingly or unknowingly incited the insurgency in Iraq by shutting down newspapers and other proactive acts, Israel, the US and Britain are inciting a civil war in Palestine. Just as the real insurgency in Iraq, not including Al-Qaeda and the Kurds, is frustrating Israel’s plans for Iraq, the civil war in Palestine will completely undo Israeli and western influence over the region, and spoil any hopes of a negotiated settlement between the Arab countries and Israel for years to come. Proxy wars in the Arab/Muslim world are not a new strategy. Nothing can be learned from them except one thing; when the proxies fail, that becomes the pretext for more desperate measures, including more violence, more troops, and last ditch efforts to wipe out all opposition once and for all, which will ultimately lead to another intifada that will probably be more like a popular insurgency than a Palestinian uprising.

The writer is the Founder and President of the National Association of Muslim American Women. The author is also head of the International Assoc. for Muslim Women and Children, an accredited NGO with the UN Division on the Rights of the Palestinians.

The little town that symbolises the suffering of the Middle East

Leading article

Bethlehem tells us something revealing. There is an exodus of the people responsible for what little prosperity there was

Published: 23 December 2006

In one of the unfailing ironies of the place religious believers call the Holy Land, its most famous emblem of peace - the little town of Bethlehem - is once again a symbol of its troubles. Its economy is in crisis. Concerns over security are keeping many tourists away. Israel's security wall has cut the town off from much of its agricultural hinterland. Unemployment stands at 65 per cent. The West's financial boycott against the Palestinian Authority has meant no salaries have been paid at the municipality for four months.

It is a complex business. The wall reflects legitimate Israeli security concerns; half the suicide bombers in 2004 are said to have come from Bethlehem. And, although Israel ceased its military activity in the Gaza Strip a month ago, Palestinian militants continue to launch rockets against Israel from there. On the other side, the recent escalation of internecine strife between the Palestinian factions has added to the tensions which have been building since voters ousted the corrupt Fatah leadership and replaced it with the more militant Hamas. Yesterday fierce gun battles raged between the two groups; some predicted all-out civil war.

But Bethlehem tells us something revealing. The Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, who arrived there on a Christmas pilgrimage earlier this week, have expressed concern - not just at the barrier which is "strangling" the place, but also at the flight of Christians from the town. Christians constituted more than 85 per cent of the population in 1948; today they make up just 12 per cent. This matters because it is the Christians who own most of the town's hotels, restaurants and shops. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza there is an exodus of the middle classes responsible for what little prosperity there was.

Prosperity for Palestinians holds the key to peace. A meeting is urgently needed between President Abbas and the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. They have a lot to discuss. High on the agenda must be the rocket attacks on Israel and the Israeli incursions into the Palestinian territories. They must also make progress on the release of Palestinian prisoners, in which they would be assisted by Hamas freeing the Israeli soldier they captured last June. To do so would be an important signal from Hamas that it intends to continue to move along the path of political realism it adopted by contesting the elections in the first place. But their guiding strategy must be to give the Palestinians the prospect of prosperity. Mr Olmert needs to look beyond short-term security considerations and ease those Israeli restrictions that are hampering the organic growth of the Palestinian economy. A new horizon of prosperity, even more than symbolic political gestures, is essential to dispelling the sense of despair that grips so many Palestinian youths.

Shifts are needed internationally too. The recent Baker-Hamilton plan called for movement in US policy on the Israeli/Palestinian problem. President Bush needs to heed that. And the European Union, which has salved its conscience in the past by giving more aid to charities working with Palestinians, needs to get off the fence and apply some political pressure to Israel.

In the midst of it all, the innocents - terrified children, disabled people, women cut off from hospitals by security checkpoints - continue to suffer. Two of the three charities for which we are raising money in our Christmas appeal this year work with such people. Supporting them is the only gesture of solidarity open to most of us. We exhort our readers to be generous in their giving. In the end, though, personal hopes must be allied to politics. If there is anything good in the present flux it is that it offers a chance to find new ways forward.

The Strategy of Disintegration: False flags, dirty tricks and the dismemberment of Iraq

December 22, 2006

By David Montoute


The erosion of a target country’s integrity and viability has always been a conscious goal of the Western colonial project. Creating instability and dissatisfaction with existing reality was a necessary prerequisite to "tame" and then integrate native peoples into the dominant hierarchical model. Today, of course, we are told that colonialism is a thing of the past. The leading nations of the international community no longer seek to enslave their less fortunate neighbours, but rather pursue policies of world benefaction - within the limits imposed by healthy competition, of course. When this miraculous conversion took place we are not told, but perhaps it occurred incrementally, parallel to the increasing divide between the world’s rich and poor. In any case, a casual glance at the state of the Muslim world is enough to shatter this foolish delusion.

As Iraqi society descends further and further into mayhem, comedians, satirists and commentators of all kinds have made great hay from the supposed incompetence and stupidity of our leaders. But as the Canadian Spectator suggested recently, if it should happen that the United States is not run by buffoons, "one must conclude that chaos, impoverishment and civil war in the Muslim world…far from being the unintended consequences, are precisely the objectives of U.S. policy." (1)

As with 9/11, the trigger event for the War on Terror, incompetence is the preferred explanation for the nightmare scenario in Iraq today. Though counterintuitive to the domesticated populations of the West, a plan to deliberately fragment Iraq along ethnic lines is amply confirmed by the published record. Resuscitating earlier Zionist schemes, the US Council on Foreign Relations recently called for the dissolution of the "unnatural Iraqi state." (2) On the grounds of its ethnic diversity, Iraq is said to be a false, artificial construct, a product of arbitrary colonial decisions in the early 20th century. It is a judgment that could apply to many of the world’s countries, and yet the theme is being enthusiastically adopted by reams of 'experts’ who would never dream of questioning state sovereignty in Quebec, the Basque Country or Northern Ireland. In typical fashion, policy analyst Michael Klare recently dismissed Iraq as an "invented country…to facilitate their exploitation of oil in the region [the British] created the fictitious "Kingdom of Iraq" by patching together three provinces of the former Ottoman Empire…and by parachuting in a fake king from what later became Saudi Arabia." (3) Accepting the Bush Administration’s bogus rationale for the invasion, Klare ascribed Sunni resistance to the desire for a bigger share of oil revenues in the future partition of the country. Missing is any idea that resistance extends beyond "Sunnis" or could be motivated by Iraqi nationalism or the need for self-determination.

Ultimately, the ease with which Western academics casually decide to reshape the countries of their choice owes itself to the continuing legacy of Orientalism. In classic nineteenth century style, the chattering classes suggest that Iraq, despite its five thousand-year history, is now incapable of managing itself, and so its fate must be decided by outside powers. A country that held together in 1991 through six weeks of the most intensive bombing campaign in history, (which according to the UN left Iraq in a "pre-industrial age") and continued to survive through 12 years of the most complete and devastating sanctions ever imposed on any nation is now blithely consigned to history by concerned Western experts. To bolster their case, the myth of ancient sectarian hatreds, a staple of the 'humanitarian intervention’ crowd, is rehashed and fed on a daily basis by journalists who neither question the authorship of "sectarian" attacks nor report the view of ordinary Iraqis, who blame the Occupation army and its puppet government for the orchestrated chaos.

Dismantling Iraq

The preparations for the occupation of Iraq began almost immediately after the first assault in 1991. With the imposition of no-fly-zones in the north and south of the country and the western media already dividing the country into three mutually antagonistic regions, the stage was set. The first glimpse of the organized plan to destroy Iraqi society came with the organized sacking of museums (170,000 pieces lost) and burning of libraries following the fall of the regime in 2003. The looting had two aspects, one indiscriminate and spontaneous and a second, in which organized trafficking network looted pieces from Uruk, Nimrud, Niniveh, and the Nabi Jarjis Mosque. The theft required a prepared, logistical infrastructure, whilst the subsequent sale of the booty was facilitated by the systematic destruction of archives, inventories and museum records (4) Later, when the Occupation forces’ first chief, General Jay Garner, recommended maintaining the Iraqi military and creating a coalition government, defense secretary Rumsfeld removed him. His successor, Paul Bremer, went on to dismantle the army and other key national institutions, as well as 'losing’ some $9 billion of Iraq’s oil revenues along the way. The reconstituted puppet army was formed almost exclusively from the Kurdish and Shia communities, a move specifically designed to incubate sectarian tensions. Meanwhile, anonymous assassins began targeting Iraq’s academic community, eventually provoking a huge 'brain drain’ from the country and further debilitating the country’s capacity to recover.

When the armed opposition groups became active in the country, there then followed a string of events bearing the hallmarks of undercover operations designed to stoke up sectarian conflict and taint the Iraqi Resistance. What follows is a brief summary of the most suspicious incidents.

UN targeted, after 12 years in Iraq

When a truck bomb tore through U.N. headquarters four months into the occupation, killing special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 19 others, pro-consul Bremer suggested two possible culprits: "Saddam loyalists or foreign insurgents". The interim government’s Ahmed Chalabi, however, had received prior notice of the attack the week before. Chalabi had been warned that a "soft target" was to be attacked, although it would be "neither the Coalition Authority nor coalition troops". But the UN, whose security had been withdrawn that day, was never warned. (5)

Kerbala and Baghdad

By November 2003, with the guerilla campaign inflicting heavy losses on US forces, the media and interim governing authority began a steady drumbeat of sectarian brainwashing. After weeks of scare mongering about a civil war, coordinated explosions left 143 Shia civilians dead in Kerbala and Baghdad. The blame fell on 'Al Qaeda’, but journalist Robert Fisk asked the obvious question: "If a violent Sunni group wished to evict the Americans from Iraq…why would it want to turn the Shia population…60 per cent of Iraqis, against them?" No answer was provided, and the senseless attacks increased. (6)

Al Iskandariya

In early February 2004 American authorities claimed to have intercepted a message from Iraq asking 'Al Qaeda’ for help in fomenting a civil war. Almost immediately, as if to underline the message, an explosion killed 50 Shias in the small town of Iskandariya. "Terrorists spark fear of civil war," announced The Independent, contradicting the town’s residents who, without exception, attributed the blast to an American air strike. "They heard a helicopter overhead, and the whoosh of a missile just before the blast." The blast itself left a crater three metres deep, more consistent with a missile than a car bomb (7)

'Al Qaeda in Iraq’

As with the parent organization, nothing about this group rings true. Until 2004 'Al Qaeda,’ a Sunni-only set up, had never uttered a word against Shias. But as the Iraqi Resistance campaign gained unstoppable momentum, the reportedly deceased Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi suddenly resurfaced. Calling for war against the 'infidel’ Shia community, he went on to wage a parallel campaign characterized more by gratuitous attacks on civilians than by ejecting the US from Iraq. In the following years, wherever the US unleashed massive assaults in Iraq, Zarqawi was conveniently 'discovered’ to be hiding. The November 2004 assault on Fallujah was waged with white phosphorous and left at least 6,000 dead beneath the ruins, and yet US surveillance was so sharp that Zarqawi, with his one wooden leg, was apparently observed fleeing on the first day! Amongst Iraqis, the all-purpose Zarqawi was referred to as a kind of mobile WMD able to appear wherever required. His story remained incredible right up to the end, the released photo evidence showing the lightly bruised body of a man killed with a 500lb bomb. (8)

Nick Berg, Margaret Hassan and the Abu Ghraib scandal

By April of 2004 the game was well and truly up. Fallujah became the first major town to come under the open control of the Resistance. Simultaneously, US repression provoked an uprising by the Shia Mehdi Army and the US found itself waging a war on two fronts. Massive shows of inter-faith solidarity ensued with 200,000 Sunnis and Shias on April 9th gathering for collective prayers in Baghdad’s largest Sunni mosque, where the lead preacher derided the possibility of civil war as an American pretext for extending the occupation. The US faced a chorus of protest around the world as it bludgeoned Fallujah from the air in a desperate attempt to retake the city. Then, photographs of systematic torture in the Abu Ghraib detention center were released to the press, finishing off what little credibility the US retained in world opinion. Detracting from the negative publicity, however, previously unknown militant groups began kidnapping foreign nationals and releasing gruesome videos in which the kidnap victims were frequently beheaded on camera when the kidnappers’ demands were not met.

The first victim was businessman Nick Berg, in an alleged 'retaliation’ for Abu Ghraib. The killing, said to be the work of al Zarqawi, came under scrutiny when independent media questioned the execution tape’s veracity. It was determined that the video had first been uploaded to the Internet from London, and after examination of the images by a Mexican forensic surgeon, many observers agreed that the man shown in the film was already a corpse when beheaded. (9)

Anglo-Irish aid worker Margaret Hassan had lived in Iraq for 30 years and dedicated her life to the welfare of Iraqis in need, fighting tirelessly against UN sanctions and opposing the Anglo-American invasion. So when she was kidnapped on her way to work in the autumn of 2004, Iraqis were incredulous. Spontaneous public information campaigns were started and a poster showing Mrs Hassan holding a sick Iraqi child appeared on billboards across the capital. "Margaret Hassan is truly a daughter of Iraq," it read. Patients of Iraqi hospitals took to the streets in protest against the hostage takers, and prominent Resistance groups, even including the phantom Zarqawi, called for her release.

Her kidnappers did not issue any specific demands, but in the captivity video Hassan pleaded for the withdrawal of British troops. In previous cases, the groups had identified themselves and used the videos to make their demands. But Margaret Hassan’s kidnapping was different from the start. This group used no specific name and no banners or flags to identify itself. In their videos appeared none of the usual armed and hooded men or Koranic recitations. Other abducted women, Robert Fisk noted, were released "when their captors recognised their innocence. But not Hassan, even though she spoke fluent Arabic and could explain her work to her captors in their own language."

A video soon surfaced purporting to show her execution and an Iraqi man, Mustafa Salman al-Jubouri, was later sentenced to life imprisonment by a Baghdad court for aiding and abetting the kidnappers. To this date, no group has ever claimed responsibility. (10)

The 'Salvador Option’

Long after piles of corpses began appearing by the roadsides, victims of anonymous assassins, Newsweek magazine reported on a Pentagon plan to use counterinsurgency death squads to eliminate Iraqi Resistance fighters and their supporters. The so-called 'Salvador Option’, named after a similar campaign in Central America in the 1980s, was confirmed by later reports of Interior ministry involvement in the burgeoning death squads. As the victims mounted, the corporate media filtered the story through its angle of Sunni fanatics targeting innocent Shia civilians. But the facts showed a different story. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the bulk of resistance attacks (75%) were on Coalition Forces, far exceeding that of any other category in their survey (with attacks organized by quantity, type of target, and numbers killed and wounded). In sharp contrast to the corporate media’s picture, civilian targets comprised a mere 4.1% of attacks. After 300,000 Baghdad Shias staged the largest popular demonstrations since 1958, M. Junaid Alam asked: "Would such a massive number of Shiites have shown up to protest the occupation if they thought that most of the Sunni-based armed resistance, also opposed to the occupation, was trying to kill them?" (11)

Car bombs

2005 saw a spectacular rise in the use of car bombs, many directed against innocent civilian targets. Though the Zarqawi network was said to have no more than about a thousand men in Iraq, it apparently had an endless supply of personnel ready to sacrifice themselves for the holy war. Other accounts, however, suggest a different explanation.

In May 2005, former Iraqi exile Imad Khadduri, reported how a driver whose license had been confiscated in Baghdad was questioned for half an hour at an American military camp, informed that there were no charges against him, and then directed to the al-Khadimiya police station to retrieve his license. "The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was…carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him. He stopped the car and … found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat…the only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated 'hideous attack by foreign elements’". (According to Khadurri, the scenario was repeated again in Mosul, when a driver’s car broke down on the way to the police station where he was sent to reclaim his license. The mechanic he then turned to discovered the spare tire to be laden with explosives.) (12)

In the same month, 64-year-old farmer Haj Haidar, who was taking his tomato load from Hilla to Baghdad, was stopped at an American checkpoint and had his pick-up thoroughly searched. Allowed to go on his way, his 11 year-old grandson then told him he saw one of the American soldiers placing a grey melon-sized object amidst the tomato containers. Realizing the vehicle was his only means of work, Haidar fought his initial impulse to run and removed the object from his truck, placing it in a nearby ditch. He later learnt that it had in fact exploded, killing part of a passing shepherd’s flock of sheep. (13)

At this point, legendary Iraqi blogger 'Riverbend’ reported that many of the supposed suicide bombings were in fact remotely detonated car bombs or time bombs. She related how a man was arrested for allegedly having shot at a National Guardsman after huge blasts struck in west Baghdad. But according the man’s neighbours, far from having shot anyone, he had seen "an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away." (14)

The SAS in Basra

In Basra on September 19th 2005, suspicious Iraqi police stopped undercover British soldiers in a Toyota Cressida. The two men then opened fire, killing one policeman and wounding another. Eventually captured, they were identified by the BBC as members of the SAS elite special forces. The soldiers were in wigs and dressed as Arabs and their car was packed with explosives and towing equipment. (15) Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, told Al-Jazeera TV that the car was meant to explode in the centre of Basra’s popular market. Before his thesis could be confirmed, however, the British army’s tanks flattened the local prison cell and freed their sinister operatives.

The phony 'hostage crisis’

Plans to orchestrate sectarian chaos became more obvious in the Occupation’s third year. In one incident, the Baghdad police told commanders of the Shia Mehdi Army that gunmen near the village of Madain were holding 150 Shia civilians hostage. When the militia sent fighters to the area to negotiate their release, they were fired upon, losing at least 25 men. "I think it was a set-up; the fire was too heavy," said an aide said to the Mehdi militia, adding the attackers used snipers and heavy machineguns. (16) Local townspeople were unaware of the supposed hostage crisis and no hostages were ever discovered there.

"Could it be a good thing?" Samarra and the 'Civil War’

Although the incessant sectarian brainwashing was clearly having an effect, Iraqis continued to dismiss the idea of a civil war. (17) In the wake of the destruction of Samarra’s Golden Mosque, however, the scale of the killing in Iraq rose sharply. Those responsible for this critical attack wore Iraqi National Guard uniforms according to the mosque guards. Joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans, patrolling the surrounding area the whole while, went on to assist a militia attack on a Sunni mosque in a pre-programmed 'response’. The response of most ordinary Iraqis, however, was quite different, According to Sami Ramadani "None of the mostly spontaneous protest marches were directed at Sunni mosques. Near the bombed shrine itself, local Sunnis joined the city's minority Shias to denounce the occupation and accuse it of sharing responsibility for the outrage. In Kut, a march led by Sadr's Mahdi army burned US and Israeli flags. In Baghdad's Sadr City, the anti-occupation march was massive." (18) The Western media, however, could now seize upon each and every incident as evidence of an irreparable social disintegration. Columnist Daniel Pipes approvingly observed that sectarian conflict would reduce attacks on US forces as Iraqis fought each other. His comments were then reflected on Fox News with onscreen captions that read: "Upside To Civil War?" and "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?" (19)

History as mystery

The key to justifying the horrendous colonial assault on Iraq was the non-stop manufacture of lies. Zionist cheerleader Thomas Freidman had likened Saddam’s Iraq to an ethnically segregated Alabama in the era of lynchings, where Shia and Kurds held sub human status. That the Minister of Health was Kurdish, that the regime had two Shia Prime ministers (Sadoun Humadi and Mohammed Al-Zubaidi), or that the Vice President was a Christian, never intruded on Freidman’s 'analysis’. In fact, Iraqis rarely asked about the religion or ethnicity of the leaders and functionaries they reported to. It was simply not a matter of concern for them.

Meanwhile, for the 'human rights’ brigade, propagandists such as The Independent’s Johann Hari would hash out a two-dimensional caricature of a country in which a hellish regime murdered, each year, 70,000 of its own citizens (without anyone really noticing). In spite of the Ba’ath government’s admitted crimes, however, a visitor could pass through Baghdad in the 1990s without coming across tanks, car bombs, kidnappings, air strikes, fuel shortages (!) power cuts and vast detention gulags. And whatever the scale of Saddam’s crimes, they pale next to those of the Occupation. As Mike Whitney has said "Saddam had no intention of dismantling the government, the army, the civic institutions; of looting the museums and killing the teachers and intellectuals, of ethnic cleansing the Christians and the Sunnis, and inciting violence between the sects. Saddam had no plan to increase malnutrition, to reduce the flow of clean water, to cut off the electricity, to remove the social-safety net, to increase the poverty and unemployment, or to set Iraqi against Iraqi in a vicious struggle for survival. Saddam did not abide by the neoconservative theory of "creative destruction," which deliberately plunged an entire nation into chaos destroying the fabric of Iraqi society and leaving the people to flock to militias for safety." (20)

The truth is that the approaching peak of global oil production threatens to fatally weaken the US power bloc. (21) Hence, Saddam’s Iraq, an independent, oil-rich state in the most geostrategically important region on earth could not be allowed to survive. But the intractable resistance to the Occupation has obligated the US to turn to its contingency plan (officially, of course, it didn’t have one) In this plan, something similar to Oded Yinon’s tripartite balkanization of the country is being thrashed out. (22) Existing independent states are to be broken up and replaced by a cluster of weak and pliant protectorates. The particulars may be very different, but the engineered breakup of Yugoslavia undoubtedly serves as the model for this dismemberment. "In the 1990s" wrote Diana Johnstone, "the US-led International Community was no longer interested in state-building. Nation-state deconstruction was more compatible with economic globalization measures." (23) To this end, in Iraq as in Yugoslavia, the US has allied itself with "state-splitters" and sectarian bigots, all the while publicly claiming to uphold national sovereignty. In case of any misunderstanding, neocon ideologues have clarified matters: 'natural’ sectarian tensions, they say, will inevitably arise in the absence of a repressive state to subdue them. Therefore, under their benevolent guidance, Iraq must be allowed to devolve into its ethnic components.

Iraq resists

After the 1991 bombing of Iraq, and George Bush Sr.’s announcement of a 'New World Order’ of American hegemony, foreign policy forums effectively proclaimed the nation-state obsolete. In fact, the global imposition of the Western model of development after WWII had already ended the traditional independence of the State. The 'new’ ideology was simply a recognition of facts on the ground. After the Soviet collapse, celebrated advocates of the anti-nation-state ideology predicted an approaching 'End of History’, which would see all the world’s peoples integrate into a globalized, urban, capitalist, consumer lifestyle. Thus, the "chaotic diversity of cultures, values and beliefs that lay behind the conflicts of the past" would be removed in a general process of political and cultural homogenization. (24) It is still too early to predict the end of this delirious vision, but across the world, people are opting to forge their own future, increasingly deaf to the advice of the super elites. In Iraq, consciousness of the big picture is greater than anywhere. Thus, the planned breakdown into generalized sectarian conflict has not materialized. As the armed resistance intensifies its struggle against the US and openly confronts the Salafi Jihadist terrorists (25), a pendant has become extremely popular amongst Iraqis. Seen on the streets and on television, anchorwomen wear it while reading the news. The pendant has the form of Iraq.

When TV stations showed Kalashnikov-weilding teenagers going toe-to-toe with the world’s most powerful army in Fallujah, the images evoked a struggle of epochal significance. But alongside the armed resistance, journalists, intellectuals, trade unionists and Iraqis of all walks of life are, each on their own terrain, facing off against military-corporate rule. However we decide to contribute, it is incumbent on all people of conscience to join them.


The author can be reached at gnaoua22@yahoo.co.uk

Notes:

1.http://canadianspectator.ca/stuff/WWIII.html

2.http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=6559

3.http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/1/154940/816

4."Saqueo a la Arqueologia" Clio: El Pasado Presente Madrid, #.20, June 2003

5.Asia Times, 20 August 2003

6.http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles360.htm

7."Terrorists spark fear of civil war as 50 die in car bomb" The Independent, Wednesday 11th February 2004

8.kurtnimmo.com/?p=419

9.http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CAR405A.html

10.http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1353695,00.html

11."Does the Resistance Target Civilians? According to US Intelligence, Not Really" M. Junaid Alam Left Hook April 18, 2005

12.(http://www.albasrah.net/maqalat/english/0505/Combat-terroris
m_160505.htm)

13.http://abutamam.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_abutamam_archive.htl
m

14.http://riverbendblog.blogspit.com/2005_05_01_riverbendblog_a
rchive.html#111636281930496496

15.www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-0365.html

16. Omar al-Ibadi, (Reuters) Oct 28

17. www.uruknet.info?p=12150

In Riverbend’s words: "Iraqis have intermarried and mixed as Sunnis and Shia for centuries. Many of the larger Iraqi tribes are a complex and intricate weave of Sunnis and Shia. We don't sit around pointing fingers at each other and trying to prove who is a Muslim and who isn't and who deserves compassion and who deserves brutalization." Regarding the lies about ethnically-based oppression by the Ba’ath, see: http://www.iraqresistance.net/article.php3?id_article=372

18. Sami Ramadani, Friday February 24, 2006 The Guardian

19.www.uruknet.info?p=20973

20.http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_1341.shtml

21."Crossing the Rubicon", Michael C. Ruppert, New Society Publishers, 2004

22."The March of The Monoculture" Helena Norberg-Hodge, The Ecologist, Volume 29, No.3 May/June 1999

23."Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions", Diana Johnstone, Pluto Press 2002

As N. Hildyard once observed: "Scratch below the surface of inter-ethnic conflict, and the shallowness and deceptiveness of 'blood’ or 'culture’ explanations are soon revealed. 'Tribal hatred’ (though a real and genuine emotion for some) emerges as a product not of 'nature’ or of a primordial 'culture’, but of a complex web of politics, economics, history, psychology and a struggle for identity." N. Hildyard, Briefing 11 – Blood and Culture: Ethnic Conflict and the Authoritarian Right, The Cornerhouse. 1999

24.Oded Yinon "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s"
http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article000
5345.html

25. "Anbar Revenge Brigade Makes Progress in the Fight Against al-Qaeda"
http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=23
69940

In Abbas, Western Hopes Hang on Thin Reed

Playing favorites undermines Palestinian national unity.
---
December 19, 2006
News Analysis

JERUSALEM, Dec. 18 — The call for early elections by Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian Authority president, is part of a Western-backed effort to revive the Middle East peace process in hopes of driving the radical Hamas party, which favors Israel’s destruction, out of power.
But Mr. Abbas today is a weak reed, with little power to carry out his decrees or his will. Two years after he was elected president, after the death of Yasir Arafat, opinion polls show that Mr. Abbas is perceived by a majority of Palestinians as a great disappointment, having brought little reform to his Fatah movement or improvement to their lives, while appearing to carry water for Israel and the United States.

Mr. Abbas made a great drama on Saturday of announcing these early elections, but they seem unlikely to happen. Hamas has promised to boycott and disrupt new legislative elections, seeing them as an attempted coup. So even if there were some form of voting, a Hamas boycott would make it hollow.

It may therefore be too late for Mr. Abbas and Fatah to be bolstered very effectively, even by a new American and British aid effort of the kind Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, here to support Mr. Abbas on Monday, seemed to foretell. Mr. Abbas is standing on shaky constitutional principles. It seems clear that he has no legal right to dissolve parliament without its consent. Not that constitutional principles are so holy here, but Mr. Abbas also lacks the power to carry out what he has decreed.

At the same time, Hamas would welcome the resignation of Mr. Abbas, which would mean an early presidential election, letting the movement try to defeat him and take full control over the Palestinian Authority.

By STEVEN ERLANGER

--MORE--

Only an end to sanctions can halt Palestine's crisis

Azzam Tamimi Tuesday December 19, 2006
The Guardian

As Hamas and Fatah supporters took to the streets to protest at or support Mahmoud Abbas's decision to call for early presidential elections, congratulatory gestures landed at Abbas's door from the three major international players that have imposed the sanctions regime against the Palestinians. The White House, Tony Blair and the Israeli government urged the world community to support Abbas in his latest bid to rid them of a Hamas-led government. These three carry the burden of Palestinian blood shed as a result of the crisis.

Despite months of sanctions, the grip of the "international community" could not prevent Hamas from bringing in enough money to maintain basic health and educational services. The hardship did little to convince Palestinians that Hamas was responsible; polls conducted in the West Bank and Gaza pointed to a rise in the popularity of Hamas, countered by an erosion of respect for Fatah.

So what does the global community think it can achieve? A resolution, as Blair naively believes? A resumption of negotiations on Israeli terms as Olmert arrogantly expects? An end to all Palestinian struggles for justice as the neocon-led US administration ignorantly hopes? Or an end to rivalry from an Islamic resistance movement that is loyal to the Palestinian dream, as Abbas wishes? There is only one way out of the crisis, and that is for the sanctions to be lifted. The immediate consequence would be the formation of a national unity government without dictation from any outside power. As for the Israelis, their only guarantee of peace would be to recognise the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and enter into negotiations for a long-term truce.

· Dr Azzam Tamimi is director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought
commentisfree.co.uk/azzam_tamimi

If Israel and its Western allies break Hamas, they will face an even deadlier foe

Johann Hari

These crazed young men - the 'troops' of Islamic Jihad - are the children of the first Intifada

Published: 18 December 2006

I am sitting in a poky bedroom somewhere in Gaza City - I'm not allowed to know where - and opposite me is a huge beaming picture of Osama bin Laden, with the smoke from a burning World Trade Centre forming a black halo around his head. He is surrounded by a gaggle of jihadi angels: some Chechen fighters, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and our own Tube bomber, the Yorkshireman Mohammed Sidique Khan. "Would you like to see our weapons?" a masked jihadi says cheerfully, before thrusting a grenade into my hand.

I have come to see what Israel will confront in a generation if - as now looks certain after this weekend - they never, ever deal with the democratically elected Hamas government, but instead resolve to break it.

Coining one of the dullest clichés about the Middle East, Abba Eban, one of Israel's longest-serving foreign ministers, famously claimed that "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity". Precisely the opposite is the case. As the Fatah President, Abu Mazen, tried desperately this Saturday to dislodge Hamas by calling for early elections, we need to remember a stark truth. Every time the Israeli government rejects a Palestinian leader because he is too hard-line, they do not get a cuddly Gandhian moderate in his place. They get somebody more hard-line still.

Yasser Arafat endorsed a two-state solution, but couldn't accept a forever-and-always string of Bantustans bisected by Israeli settler-only roads as his half of the deal - so they rocketed and shelled the old man's compound until he died. Many Israelis now look back on Arafat with near-nostalgia. Today the Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, says he can never accept Israel's existence. But he is offering a 40-year-long hudna (ceasefire) - provided Israel withdraws to the internationally recognised 1967 borders, as they should anyway under international law.

Haniyeh is offering to kick all the tough issues down the road until 2046, and build two peacefully co-existing states, with no mutual violence. His track record of keeping his word on ceasefires is strong: in the current short hudna, Hamas has held its fire even as Fatah fires a few Qassam missiles.

But the governments of America, Europe and Israel are snubbing this deal too. They say Haniyeh has to recognise Israel totally, and today. Until he does, his people will be "put on a diet", in the words of one Israeli government adviser. I have seen what this means: hospitals shut and shuttered across the West Bank, with women left to give birth at home like pre-modern peasants. The yellowish hue of malnutrition on children's faces. The empty and echoing schools.

Tony Blair has been at the forefront of this programme to force Hamas to concede, and is in the Middle East to promote it further. For him, the onus is on the Palestinians living under military occupation to justify why they should be freed - rather than on the people who have been oppressing them on their own land for 39 years to explain why it should continue.

The result of breaking the democratic will of the Palestinian people will not be greater softness on their part. No. It will create more men like Abu Ahmad (a nom de guerre), who I sat with last week in the shadow of Bin Laden in a corner of Gaza.

"I want to kill and kill and kill again. I want to be a killing machine until, inshallah [God willing], I become a martyr," he said, staring at me intensely. He is 27 - my age - and murderous. He has just described how he slashed the throats of four female Israeli soldiers in an illegal settlement in 2002, and he chuckled as he described how they cried for their mothers. "All the Jews have to be killed," he says. The children? The women? "I prefer to kill soldiers, but they must all be killed in time. Soldiers first." The Holocaust did not happen, he says, "but it should have".

These crazed young men - the "troops" of Islamic Jihad - are the children of the first Intifada. They saw their parents peacefully protest, and the Israeli troops be ordered to "break their bones" as punishment. Abu Hamza, a sober, severe 26-year-old, explained he first joined Islamic Jihad when he was 10 - a year after he took his first Israeli bullet in the skull. He had been throwing stones and setting fire to old tyres in the street when it happened, and he became a local celebrity as the first child victim of the violence. "I was so proud," he said. He invited me to feel the scar on the back of his head. "Yes," he said with a smile, "we have been growing in popularity over the past few years. Very much."

All over Gaza and the West Bank, the assault on Hamas is creating groups like this to their right, deranged little pockets that will swell if Hamas is totally humiliated. At the moment, they are small, speaking - as Hamas did a generation ago - for only a small fraction of Palestinians. But for how long?

Last week I tried to trace the footsteps of a new streak of Islamist fanaticism that has jutted suddenly into Gaza over the past month. A group calling itself Swords of Islam has started blowing up internet cafés - a symbol of extra-Koranic knowledge and cosmopolitan connection to the world. They have issued Talibanist threats warning that women who do not wear the hijab will be "burned", and that the internet is a "Zionist plot" to keep people away from "their religious duties".

In a bombed-out café named Montada Donajoun in the Jaballiya refugee camp, I spoke to the terrified owner. Basa Abu-Jased, 29, said, "Of course women are frightened now. [Even as a man] I am really frightened! I used to sit on the street and talk to women. Now I won't do it. You don't know what's going to happen." Almost everybody on the street was too frightened to speculate about who these people were; one woman suggested they were "maniacs who had returned from fighting in Iraq", but then hurried away.

It took a very long time to rouse the Palestinians to violence and produce these pathologies. Between 1967 and 1982 - as 200,000 Palestinians were expelled and more than one-third of their remaining land was stolen by fanatical settlers - just 282 Israelis were killed by Palestinians. But Israeli policies have virtually guaranteed a tip towards great violence and forms of madness. Every time the Palestinians have peacefully protested or negotiated, they have been choked further.

There is still - still - a majority in Palestine for peaceful coexistence with Israel, with 67 per cent supporting the Hamas proposal for a 40-year hudna. But if their democratic will is treated with contempt by humiliating Hamas, this historical window will close. Every year the occupation goes on, more deranged people like Abu Ahmad are smelted. "I love Osama bin Laden," he said to me as we parted, slapping me on the back. "I love killing."

j.hari@ independent.co.uk

I am sitting in a poky bedroom somewhere in Gaza City - I'm not allowed to know where - and opposite me is a huge beaming picture of Osama bin Laden, with the smoke from a burning World Trade Centre forming a black halo around his head. He is surrounded by a gaggle of jihadi angels: some Chechen fighters, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and our own Tube bomber, the Yorkshireman Mohammed Sidique Khan. "Would you like to see our weapons?" a masked jihadi says cheerfully, before thrusting a grenade into my hand.

I have come to see what Israel will confront in a generation if - as now looks certain after this weekend - they never, ever deal with the democratically elected Hamas government, but instead resolve to break it.

Coining one of the dullest clichés about the Middle East, Abba Eban, one of Israel's longest-serving foreign ministers, famously claimed that "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity". Precisely the opposite is the case. As the Fatah President, Abu Mazen, tried desperately this Saturday to dislodge Hamas by calling for early elections, we need to remember a stark truth. Every time the Israeli government rejects a Palestinian leader because he is too hard-line, they do not get a cuddly Gandhian moderate in his place. They get somebody more hard-line still.

Yasser Arafat endorsed a two-state solution, but couldn't accept a forever-and-always string of Bantustans bisected by Israeli settler-only roads as his half of the deal - so they rocketed and shelled the old man's compound until he died. Many Israelis now look back on Arafat with near-nostalgia. Today the Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, says he can never accept Israel's existence. But he is offering a 40-year-long hudna (ceasefire) - provided Israel withdraws to the internationally recognised 1967 borders, as they should anyway under international law.

Haniyeh is offering to kick all the tough issues down the road until 2046, and build two peacefully co-existing states, with no mutual violence. His track record of keeping his word on ceasefires is strong: in the current short hudna, Hamas has held its fire even as Fatah fires a few Qassam missiles.

But the governments of America, Europe and Israel are snubbing this deal too. They say Haniyeh has to recognise Israel totally, and today. Until he does, his people will be "put on a diet", in the words of one Israeli government adviser. I have seen what this means: hospitals shut and shuttered across the West Bank, with women left to give birth at home like pre-modern peasants. The yellowish hue of malnutrition on children's faces. The empty and echoing schools.

Tony Blair has been at the forefront of this programme to force Hamas to concede, and is in the Middle East to promote it further. For him, the onus is on the Palestinians living under military occupation to justify why they should be freed - rather than on the people who have been oppressing them on their own land for 39 years to explain why it should continue.

The result of breaking the democratic will of the Palestinian people will not be greater softness on their part. No. It will create more men like Abu Ahmad (a nom de guerre), who I sat with last week in the shadow of Bin Laden in a corner of Gaza.

"I want to kill and kill and kill again. I want to be a killing machine until, inshallah [God willing], I become a martyr," he said, staring at me intensely. He is 27 - my age - and murderous. He has just described how he slashed the throats of four female Israeli soldiers in an illegal settlement in 2002, and he chuckled as he described how they cried for their mothers. "All the Jews have to be killed," he says. The children? The women? "I prefer to kill soldiers, but they must all be killed in time. Soldiers first." The Holocaust did not happen, he says, "but it should have".

These crazed young men - the "troops" of Islamic Jihad - are the children of the first Intifada. They saw their parents peacefully protest, and the Israeli troops be ordered to "break their bones" as punishment. Abu Hamza, a sober, severe 26-year-old, explained he first joined Islamic Jihad when he was 10 - a year after he took his first Israeli bullet in the skull. He had been throwing stones and setting fire to old tyres in the street when it happened, and he became a local celebrity as the first child victim of the violence. "I was so proud," he said. He invited me to feel the scar on the back of his head. "Yes," he said with a smile, "we have been growing in popularity over the past few years. Very much."

All over Gaza and the West Bank, the assault on Hamas is creating groups like this to their right, deranged little pockets that will swell if Hamas is totally humiliated. At the moment, they are small, speaking - as Hamas did a generation ago - for only a small fraction of Palestinians. But for how long?

Last week I tried to trace the footsteps of a new streak of Islamist fanaticism that has jutted suddenly into Gaza over the past month. A group calling itself Swords of Islam has started blowing up internet cafés - a symbol of extra-Koranic knowledge and cosmopolitan connection to the world. They have issued Talibanist threats warning that women who do not wear the hijab will be "burned", and that the internet is a "Zionist plot" to keep people away from "their religious duties".

In a bombed-out café named Montada Donajoun in the Jaballiya refugee camp, I spoke to the terrified owner. Basa Abu-Jased, 29, said, "Of course women are frightened now. [Even as a man] I am really frightened! I used to sit on the street and talk to women. Now I won't do it. You don't know what's going to happen." Almost everybody on the street was too frightened to speculate about who these people were; one woman suggested they were "maniacs who had returned from fighting in Iraq", but then hurried away.

It took a very long time to rouse the Palestinians to violence and produce these pathologies. Between 1967 and 1982 - as 200,000 Palestinians were expelled and more than one-third of their remaining land was stolen by fanatical settlers - just 282 Israelis were killed by Palestinians. But Israeli policies have virtually guaranteed a tip towards great violence and forms of madness. Every time the Palestinians have peacefully protested or negotiated, they have been choked further.

There is still - still - a majority in Palestine for peaceful coexistence with Israel, with 67 per cent supporting the Hamas proposal for a 40-year hudna. But if their democratic will is treated with contempt by humiliating Hamas, this historical window will close. Every year the occupation goes on, more deranged people like Abu Ahmad are smelted. "I love Osama bin Laden," he said to me as we parted, slapping me on the back. "I love killing."

j.hari@ independent.co.uk