Todays Top Storiesddd
Monday, June 30, 2003
-Articles on/about Japan/Asia (many in translation)
Japan Focus
http://www.zmag.org/asiawatch/japan_focus.htm
They have many articles translated from the Japanese into English. For example:
Japanese Government Should Dispose of World War II Vomiting Gas
Keiichi Tsuneishi
The author is a Kanagawa University professor who specializes in disarmament of biological and chemical weapons and the leading specialist on Japan’s wartime biological and chemical warfare Unit 731. He contributed this comment to The Asahi Shimbun of June 23, 2003.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=3823
The Bush Strategy and Japan’s War Contingency Laws
by Asai Motofumi
Translation from the Japanese original by Vic Koschmann for Japan Focus
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=44&ItemID=3713
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Also see:
Korea Watch
http://www.zmag.org/asiawatch/koreawatch.htm
Base21 (Similar to IndyMedia)
http://www.base21.org/
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Other translations:
?uƒ??[ƒhƒ}ƒbƒv?v‚Ì?lŒÃŠw
Archaeology of the roadmap
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 12 - 18 June 2003 (Issue No. 642)
http://home.att.ne.jp/sun/RUR55/J/ArchaeologyOfTheRoadmap.htm
http://www.counterpunch.org/said06142003.html
Next Year at Mas’Ha
by Starhawk
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3582
—ˆ?N‚Ü‚½?Aƒ}ƒXƒn?[‚Å
http://rootless.org/z/palestine/Next_Year_MasHa
Foreign Aggressors Target North Korea Again
David Wall teaches at the East Asia Institute of the University of Cambridge and is associate fellow (Asia) at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=3805
The Other Japanese Occupation
by John W. Dower
John Dower’s War Without Mercy and his Pulitzer prize-winning Embracing Defeat have established him as the pre-eminent American historian of twentieth century Japan.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=3800
-Kikkoman and GM Soybeans
- In a recent move, however, the leading soy sauce manufacturer Kikkoman
Corp. has begun using only non-GM soybeans in its products (which command
27 percent of the domestic market). “We have always used soybeans whose
safety was assured,” said spokesman Masahiko Shinoharaha. “We wanted our
customers to enjoy our soy sauce without any worries.” (The Japan Times
2003 June 22)
---
Kikkoman K.K. Japan
Kikkoman Trading Europe GmbH
Important for your declaration: Our products are all GMO-free
http://www.kikkoman-europe.com/e/10/10-02/index.html
Kikkoman Australia
http://www.kikkoman.com.au/
Kikkoman Soy Sauce made from soybeans that have not been genetic modified
is available in Australia.
Our products in the United States and Canada are made from locally produced
soybeans, and distributors do not separate genetically modified soybeans
from other soybeans. So our products there do not claim to be GMO-free or
gentically modified.
---
For your information:
Sincerely,
Akiko
---
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20030622a1.htm
The Japan Times: June 22, 2003
In the realm of the superbean
By SETSUKO KAMIYA
Staff writer
It’s amazing how much tiny little beans can do.
Though they’re only the size of peas, the light-brown seeds of the soybean
plant are one of the food wonders of the world. They are, too,
indispensable to Japanese cuisine, and though they only rarely appear raw
and unadulterated in the nation’s kitchens, for most Japanese hardly a day
passes without them dining on some form of the bean.
Soybeans in their raw state, replete with nutritional goodness.
In fact, for all the millions who start their days with a typical Japanese
breakfast of rice and miso soup, there’s that bean already before their
bleary eyes in the steaming contents of their soup bowl—since miso is a
fermented concoction of boiled soybeans, rice and salt.
Depending on its region of origin, miso may be made using wheat instead of
rice, or simply using soybeans and salt. As a result, miso comes in many
colors, shades and tastes—but most Japanese (and many others, too) would
agree they are all delicious.
But miso soup isn’t just delicious; it’s amazingly versatile. Among the
ingredients most frequently added to miso are seaweed and Japanese leeks,
though tofu—itself made from coagulated soy milk—is often plopped in
there, too, either in its plain form or in deep-fried slices called
abura-age. Perhaps predictably enough, the oil the bean curd is fried in is
quite likely to be made from pressed soybeans, too.
With that, though, the soybean plant’s contribution to the typical Japanese
breakfast is not yet over, as many people like nothing more on their bowl
of sticky white rice than a big sticky dollop of natto—which is
fermented soybeans. Originated in Japan, natto is made by introducing a
bacterium called bacillus natto, which grows on rice straw, into boiled
soybeans before allowing them to ferment. In addition, many people like to
eat their natto mixed with some mustard and soy sauce—the seasoning made
by fermenting defatted soybeans, wheat and salt. Though it’s noted for its
peculiar smell, and taste, many Japanese would swear that “natto every day
keeps the doctor away.”
If, however, your favorite way to start the day is with a plate of bacon
and eggs and a slice of toast, you, too, are likely partaking of your
ration of soybeans. Maybe you used soy oil for the frying; and if it’s
margarine you spread on your toast, that will likely contain soy oil, too.
Even the hens and pigs providing the protein may well have been fed soybean
products.
And all that is just the soybean plant’s contribution to the day’s first
meal for many people in Japan.
The soybean plant (Glycine max) is an annual member of the pea family that
is native to Japan and China, and for all their popularity in this country,
tofu, soy sauce and miso all originated in China. For around 1,000 years
the Japanese have been adapting all these food products to suit their own
tastes, along the way developing hundreds of enchanting ways to cook and
serve them.
Despite having lived with soybeans for so long, the Japanese have recently
begun paying renewed attention to them as our understanding of their
numerous health benefits improves.
Often referred to as hatake no gyuniku (beef from the fields), soybeans
comprise around 35 percent protein of a type that helps to lower the
blood’s cholesterol level. They also contain lipid, a fatty organic
compound that is believed to raise the levels of beneficial cholesterol.
Additionally, these humble pea-plant seeds deliver beneficial sugars,
calcium, Vitamin E, fiber and—as has become known recently—soy
isoflavones.
This latter chemical, when accumulated in the human body, function like the
female sex hormone estrogen, which plays a role in the formation and
maintenance of bone. Hence it is considered particularly beneficial for
older women whose post-menopausal estrogen level fall, reducing their risk
of osteoporisis as well as easing their menopausal disorders.
In addition, it is now believed that soy isoflavones may play a role in
preventing cancers. A 2003 report by researchers at the National Cancer
Center in Tokyo, who surveyed the health and diet of some 20,000 women over
10 years from 1990, found that women who ate miso soup with every meal had
40 percent less chance of contracting breast cancer than those who didn’t
eat miso soup at all. While cautioning about the salt in miso, the report
said that these findings were a clear indicator of the health benefits of a
soybean diet.
New products on the market
But if tofu and miso are both very good for the body, natto is believed to
be even better. Because it is fermented, natto acquires additional
nutritional components, including six times the amount of vitamin B2—
which encourages cell growth and renewal—found in unfermented beans.
What’s more, natto has an enzyme in it called nattokinase, which acts to
dissolve blood clots and so reduce the danger of heart attacks and strokes.
A small selection of the enormous range of processed goods and beverages
derived from soybeans that can be found in any Japanese supermarket.
Taken together, health claims such as these have elevated the humble soy to
superbean status. They have, too, fueled a drive to put new soy products on
the market.
Soy milk is a notable example. In the last year or two, supermarkets and
convenience stores have begun selling soy milk not just in its plain form
(as they have always done), but made into drinks with flavors ranging from
coffee to various fruits and sesame. And they are selling well. According
to the Japan Soy Milk Association, soy milk production in 2002 was 16.8
percent up on the year before. This, said association spokesman Atsushi
Kanda, continued a trend that has been evident over the past five years,
and is likely to continue.
“Soy milk was previously drunk mostly abroad, in countries where it was a
primary way of consuming soybeans,” Kanda said. “But with Japanese people
appreciating the health benefits of soy more these days, they are drinking
more soy milk now.”
While some Japanese used to not drink soy milk because of its peculiar
smell and taste, Kanda said that the new flavors manufacturers have come
out with have helped fuel the increase in consumption.
Tapping into this trend, coffee franchises like Starbucks and Tully’s
Coffee have, since this spring, put soy milk on their menus as a 50 yen
optional extra for customers who prefer it to dairy milk.
The ways of the bean: How raw soybeans become some of the best-known
soybean food products.
According to Starbucks Coffee Japan spokeswoman Miya Urasawa, the coffee
chain’s stores in the U.S. have had soy milk on the menu since 1995. A few
Japanese outlets began offering the soy option in 1999, after one store had
to turn down a request for soy milk from an American customer who was
allergic to dairy products. Urusawa reports that the company’s move to
introduce soy milk in all its stores was because “recently, we were being
increasingly asked for the soy milk option not just by foreign customers
but also by many Japanese women.”
Competitor Tully’s Coffee, however, offers soy milk only in its stores in
Japan. “Soy milk adds a rich flavor to the coffee, and it should be enjoyed
not just by health-conscious people but among wider range of customers,”
said Tully’s Coffee Japan spokeswoman Tomoko Takahashi. “In fact, we will
be introducing a new soy milk-based frozen drink from Monday,” she added.
In addition to such moves, restaurants that specialize in serving only tofu
dishes or sweets made from soybeans are now opening in fashionable spots
such as the Marunouchi Building and Roppongi Hills Complex in Tokyo.
Ironically, however, although Japan consumes so many soy products, its
self-sufficiency rate in terms of soybean production is very low. In fiscal
2001, in fact, it was only 5 percent—virtually all of which was used for
edible products. With soy products made of domestically produced soybeans
accounting for only 26 percent of what is eaten in Japan, most of the
enormous shortfall is made up by imports from the United States, followed
by Brazil, Canada, China and Argentina at prices far below anything
domestic growers can match. Of these imports, the majority is used to make
oil, though soy sauce, tofu, natto and other products sold here also rely
on foreign beans.
However, there are consumer concerns over the import of soybeans from
genetically modified plants. Whereas the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry
and Fisheries states that those beans grown in Japan are all non-GM, trade
statistics show that out of some 5.03 million tons of soybeans imported in
fiscal 2002, only 740,000 tons were known to be non-GM. The remaining 4.29
million tons of imported beans were used mostly to make soy oil—and what
proportion of that total was GM is not included in official data, according
to the ministry.
Since 2001, soy-product manufacturers have been required by the Japanese
Agricultural Standard to state whether they use GM soybeans or not. Japan’s
tofu and natto manufacturers say they are committed to using imported
non-GM beans. However, when soy oil and soy sauce are made using GM beans,
manufacturers are not obliged to state that fact, as the genetically
modified DNA is not detected in the end product.
In a recent move, however, the leading soy sauce manufacturer Kikkoman
Corp. has begun using only non-GM soybeans in its products (which command
27 percent of the domestic market). “We have always used soybeans whose
safety was assured,” said spokesman Masahiko Shinoharaha. “We wanted our
customers to enjoy our soy sauce without any worries.”
Although the Japanese diet has relied heavily on soybeans for so long,
there is nothing static in the evolving story of this little bean that’s
held by many in near-magical regard.
-Canadian Canola farmer Percy Schmeizer in
from Paul McCartin
You may know of Percy Schmeizer.
He is a Canadian canola farmer. Several years ago Schmeizer’s neighbor
planted a variety of canola that contained Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant
gene. Schmeizer says some of the seed blew over to his 700-acre canola
field and spread, contaminating with foreign genes seed he had been
saving since he started producing the crop in 1947.
Monsanto sued Schmeizer, claiming he was violating its intellectual
property rights for growing a kind of rapeseed that contained its
patented gene. A provincial court has ruled for the company, declaring
that regardless of how the gene found its way onto his land, Canadian
patent law provides that he is violating patent rights by growing it.
Schmeizer will be in Japan in June-July to talk about his situation. You
can find his schedule here:
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-227 Years of Bloody Freedom on July 4th
by John Stanton
“Great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation.” That according to Leo Szilard, the Manhattan Project physicist commenting on the United States and its decision in August of 1945 to obliterate non-military targets Hiroshima (70,000 dead instantly with 210,000 total deaths) and Nagasaki (40,000 dead instantly with 200,000 total deaths) in Japan. When the United States of America takes its place in the graveyard of empires, its tombstone will display Szilard?fs words alongside the inscription, “Born in violence, practiced violence and came to a violent end.” Americans fancy their society as a peaceful, freedom loving enterprise when the reality is that Americans are brutally competitive and adversarial in every aspect of their lives. And they are warlike to the core. Is it any wonder that in America, the easiest act for the US government to carry out is war?
As Americans prepare to celebrate their Independence Day this July 4, 2003, with a grandiose glorification of ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-and wars from days past--it?fs worth remembering those millions of civilians and/or non-combatants who have died at the hands of unconstrained and psychopathic American power. The US government has a long history of reengineering and downsizing populations that get in the way of freedom loving Americans and their business interests. Each and every American has the blood of the world on his/her hands. And freedom is going to get even bloodier as history, it turns out, is an excellent guide.
Kill ‘Em All
Prior to those fateful days in August of 1945, the US Target Committee met in May of 1945 and discussed the need for following up those two days of nuclear infamy with B-29 incendiary raids. “The feasibility of following the raid by an incendiary mission was discussed. This has the great advantage that the enemies’fire fighting ability will probably be paralyzed by the gadget [atomic bomb] so that a very serious conflagration should be capable of being started.” The US Target Committee, anxious to collect data on the “gadget?fs” performance recommended a 24 hour waiting period before letting loose the B-29?fs to vaporize any humans or structures that might have survived the “gadget?fs” output.
In February of 1945 in Dresden, Germany, the United States--and its coalition partner Great Britain--were engaged in the firebombing slaughter of scores of German civilians and refugees fleeing the Soviet Army?fs advance. According to rense.com. “Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600, 000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for “suggestions on how to blaze 600,000 refugees. He wasn’t interested in how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700,000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the center of the city reached 1600 degrees centigrade. More than 260,000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the center of the city could not be traced. Approximately 500,000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night?cOthers hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots.”
Writing in World War II magazine, Christopher Lew points out that the Americans incinerated Tokyo, Japan in March of 1945 via firebombing raids killing 100,000 civilians. The US government engaged in military campaigns such as Operation Starvation meant to deny food supplies to the population. Every city in Japan was targeted in a ruthless, murderous and calculated manner. Yet, the Emperor of Japan?fs residence was considered off limits by US commanders (the rationale being he would be an asset in the post-war era). “For three hours over Tokyo, 334 B-29s unleashed their cargo [including napalm] upon the dense city below. The fires raged out of control in little less than 30 minutes, aided by a 28-mph wind. Even the water in the rivers reached the boiling point. The fire was so intense that it created updrafts that tossed the gigantic B-29s around as if they were feathers. Officially the Japanese listed 83,793 killed and 40,918 injured. A total of 265,171 buildings were destroyed, and 15.8 square miles of the city were burned to ashes. It was the greatest urban disaster, man-made or natural, in all of history.” The slaughter of the Japanese and their cities was unrelenting and so insidiously effective that the US military ran out of targets.
Of course, the US government has never been content just to annihilate those pesky civilians in other lands. There?fs always work to be done right here in the United States. Whether rounding up Arabs in 2003 and locking them away or engaging in genocide in the 1800?fs, the US government has a long history of reengineering and downsizing populations that get in the way of freedom loving Americans. For example, in 1830 the Congress of the United States passed the Indian Removal Act according to understandingprejudice.org. President Andrew Jackson quickly signed the bill into law. In the summer of 1838, US Army General Winfield Scott led his men in the invasion of the Cherokee Nation. In one of many bloody episodes in US history, men, women, and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles--some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions. Under the indifferent US Army commanders, an estimated 5,000 native Americans would die on the Trail of Tears.
The Tradition Continues: Make War Not Love
Thanks to its penchant for war and belief in its divine invincibility, worldwide polls now show that the United States is a reviled nation. Little surprise there. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugs off the deaths of 10,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is equally without pity for the American troops now dying each day in both failed military campaigns. Attorney General John Ashcroft-who now likes to be addressed as General Ashcroft-presides over an American justice system which has stripped away the rights of all Americans to due process and other rights formerly guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. In the US, accused serial killers and rapists have more access to legal assistance than an individual suspected of terrorism. And for the first time, America has more of its citizens incarcerated and executed than any nation on the planet. “With liberty and justice for all” seems meaningless as the United States flaunts the fact that it runs a death camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that its foreign and domestic policies include torture, assassination, and eavesdropping on any person it deems a threat to national security.
America has been at war since 1775. Indeed, the US has never been at peace. The following are considered major conflicts: Revolutionary War (1775-1783), War of 1812 (1812-1815), Mexican War (1846-1848), Civil War (1861-1865), Spanish American War (1898), World War I (1917-1918), World War II (1941-1945), Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam War (1964-1972), and the Gulf War I (1990-1991). And that list excludes the invasion of Panama, Grenada, Serbia, Gulf War II and a whole slew of covert actions that overthrew governments the world over. The future holds Iran, North Korea, Syria, Colombia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and, arguably, the entire planet.
Unfortunately, war is the defining characteristic of the US government and a majority of its people. American freedom depends on war and their economic system demands it. “Under capitalism, corporations that produce weapons make huge profits from these weapons of war and therefore are happy both to prepare for war and to engage in war. You prepare for war, you have all these government contracts, and make all this money, and you engage in war and you use up all these products and you have to replace them,” according to Howard Zinn.
Is there any hope of breaking away from a bloody history celebrated mindlessly each July 4th? Will Americans ever live up to the ideals set forth in the US Constitution? Can they break the habit of war?
“War has always diminished our freedom,” says Zinn. “When our freedom has expanded, it has not come as a result of war or of anything the government has done but as a result of what citizens have done. The best test of that is the history of black people in the United States, the history of slavery and segregation. It wasn’t the government that initiated the movement against slavery but white and black abolitionists. It wasn’t the government that initiated the battle against racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, but the movement of people in the South. It wasn’t the government that gave the people the freedom to work eight hours a day instead of twelve hours a day. It was working people themselves who organized into unions, went out on strike, and faced the police. The government was on the other side; the government was always in support of the employers and the corporations.
The freedom of working people, the freedom of black people has always depended on the struggles of people themselves against the government. So, if we look at it historically, we certainly cannot depend on governments to maintain our liberties. We have to depend on our own organized efforts.”
Only the American people can stop war. What will they do? The world waits.
John Stanton is the author (along with Wayne Madsen) of America?fs Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II, May 2003, available at booksurge.com and barnesandnoble.com. Reach him at
-Spencer Kagan Japan workshop tour schedule/
Dr. Spencer Kagan Japan workshop tour
Schedule as of June 27, 2003
Monday, Sept. 15, 2003 (Nagoya) 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Title: “Cooperative structures and language learning”
Sponsors: Nagoya, Gifu, and Toyohashi JALT chapters,
Teacher Education and Teaching Children SIGs,
JAPANetwork, and Kawai Juku Trident Language School
Location: Nagoya, TBA
Contact: Linda Donan
Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2003 (Nagoya) 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Title: “Cooperative structures to promote critical
reflection”
Sponsor: Nanzan University
Location: Nagoya, Nanzan University
Contact: Louise Haynes
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2003 (Aichi pref., Kariya shi)
10:50 AM - 12:20 PM
Title: “Cooperative structures to improve learning,
classroom management, and student social skills”
Sponsor: Aichi University of Education
Location: Aichi pref., Kariya shi, Aichi University of
Education
Contact: Jane Nakagawa
Saturday, Sept. 20, 2003 (Tokyo) 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Title: “Kagan cooperative structures to promote
language learning, caring, and peace”
Sponsors: Teachers College Tokyo branch, JASCD and
GILE
Location: Teachers College Tokyo
Contact: Michele Milner
Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2003 (Tokyo) 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Title: “Cooperative structures for any lesson”
Sponsor: Ochanomizu University
Location: Tokyo, Ochanomizu University
Contact: Diane Nagatomo
Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2003 (Tokyo) 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Title: “Multiple intelligences: visions, myths, and
structures”
Sponsor: Soka University
Location: Hachioji shi, Soka University
Contact: Prof. Sekita
Friday, Sept. 26, 2003 (Tokyo) S 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Title: “Positive human relations via cooperative
structures”
(Pre-conference workshop at Peace as a Global Language
II conference)
Location: (Tokyo) Seisen University
Contact: Alison Miyake
visit: http://www.eltcalendar.com/PGL2003
Sunday, Sept. 28, 2003 (Tokyo) 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Title: “Cooperative structures, character, and peace”
(Experiential plenary at Peace as a Global Language II
conference)
Location: (Tokyo) Seisen University
Contact: Alison Miyake
visit: [url=http://www.eltcalendar.com/PGL2003]http://www.eltcalendar.com/PGL2003[/url]
For further information about Dr. Spencer Kagan, visit
http://www.kaganoline.com
-The Meaning of Rachel Corrie, Of Dignity and Solidarity
By EDWARD SAID June 23, 2003
http://www.counterpunch.org/said06232003.html
In early May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie’s parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter’s murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter’s body. They had immediately sought out their US Senators, Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn’t materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family.
But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman’s action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before. Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable documents of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern showed her by all the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government’s insidious attempt at a kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and tell her, “ You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it.”
What shines through all the letters she wrote home and which were subsequently published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just the same. We have heard so much recently about the roadmap and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all, which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even under the collective punishment meted out to them by the combined might of the US and Israel. It is that extraordinary fact which is the reason for the existence of a roadmap and all the numerous so-called peace plans before them, not at all because the US and Israel and the international community have been convinced for humanitarian reasons that the killing and the violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the power of Palestinian resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing, which does much more harm than good), despite all its failings and all its mistakes, we miss everything. Palestinians have always been a problem for the Zionist project, and so-called solutions have perennially been proposed that minimize, rather than solve, the problem. The official Israeli policy, no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word “occupation” or not or whether or not he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals nor ever to admit that their rights were scandalously violated all along by Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to deal with this other concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like the majority of American Jews have made every effort to deny, avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace.
Moreover, the roadmap says nothing about justice or about the historical punishment meted out to the Palestinian people for too many decades to count. What Rachel Corrie’s work in Gaza recognized, however, was precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the Palestinian people as a national community, and not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. That is what she was in solidarity with. And we need to remember that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small number of intrepid souls here and there, but is recognized the world over. In the past six months I have lectured in four continents to many thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian people which is now a byword for emancipation and enlightenment, regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies.
Whenever the facts are made known, there is immediate recognition and an expression of the most profound solidarity with the justice of the Palestinian cause and the valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on its behalf. It is an extraordinary thing that Palestine was a central issue this year both during the Porto Alegre anti-globalization meetings as well as during the Davos and Amman meetings, both poles of the world- wide political spectrum. Just because our fellow citizens in this country are fed an atrociously biased diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media, when the occupation is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks, the apartheid wall 25 feet high, five feet thick, and 350 kilometers long that Israel is building is never even shown on CNN and the networks (or so much as referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the roadmap), and the crimes of war, the gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming, house demolitions, agricultural destruction, and death imposed on Palestinian civilians are never shown for the daily, completely routine ordeal that they are, one shouldn’t be surprised that Americans in the main have a very low opinion of Arabs and Palestinians. After all, please remember that all the main organs of the establishment media, from left liberal all the way over to fringe right, are unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti- Palestinian. Look at the pusillanimity of the media during the buildup to an illegal and unjust war against Iraq, and look at how little coverage there was of the immense damage against Iraqi society done by the sanctions, and how relatively few accounts there were of the immense world-wide outpouring of opinion against the war. Hardly a single journalist except Helen Thomas has taken the administration to task for the outrageous lies and confected “facts” that were spun out about Iraq as an imminent military threat to the US before the war, just as now the same government propagandists, whose cynically invented and manipul ated “facts” about WMD are now more or less forgotten or shrugged off as irrelevant, are let off the hook by media heavies in discussing the awful, the literally inexcusable situation for the people of Iraq that the US has now single-handedly and irresponsibly created there. However else one blames Saddam Hussein as a vicious tyrant, which he was, he had provided the people of Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water, electricity, health, and education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in place.
It is no wonder, then, with the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticizing Israel for its daily crimes of war against innocent unarmed Palestinian civilians or criticizing the US government and being called “anti-American” for its illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation, that the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture, history and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, has cowed far too many of us into believing that Arabs really are an underdeveloped, incompetent and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world for being retarded, behind the times, unmodernized, and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle truth from propaganda.
No one would deny that most Arab countries today are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to the ruthless forms of fundamentalist religion. Yet it is simply a lie to say, as the New York Times regularly does, that Arab societies are totally controlled, and that there is no freedom of opinion, no civil institutions, no functioning social movements for and by the people. Press laws notwithstanding, you can go to downtown Amman today and buy a communist party newspaper as well as an Islamist one; Egypt and Lebanon are full of papers and journals that suggest much more debate and discussion than these societies are given credit for; the satellite channels are bursting with diverse opinions in a dizzying variety; civil institutions are, on many levels having to do with social services, human rights, syndicates, and research institutes, very lively all over the Arab world. A great deal more must be done before we have the appropriate level of democracy, but we are on the way.
In Palestine alone there are over a 1000 NGO’s and it is this vitality and this kind of activity that has kept society going, despite every American and Israeli effort made to vilify, stop or mutilate it on a daily basis. Under the worst possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor has it crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work, organizations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offense to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn’t worked at all, and never will work. Why is that so hard for Israelis to see? We must help them to understand this, not by suicide bombs, but by rational argument, mass civil disobedience, organized protest, here and everywhere.
The point I am trying to make is that we have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in particular in more comparative and critical ways than superficial and dismissive books like Lewis’s What Went Wrong and Paul Wolfowitz’s ignorant statements about bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic world even begin to suggest. Whatever else is true about the Arabs, there is an active dynamic at work because as real people they live in a real society with all sorts of currents and crosscurrents in it that can’t be easily caricatured as just one seething mass of violent fanaticism. The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one expresses solidarity, rather than endless criticism and exasperated, frustrating discouragement, and crippling divisiveness. Remember the solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia, and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.
I want now to speak about dignity, which of course has a special place in every culture known to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and humanists. I shall begin by saying immediately that it is a radically wrong Orientalist, and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans and Americans, Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life, no values that express love, intimacy and understanding that are supposed to be the property exclusively of cultures like those of Europe and America that had an Renaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment. Among many others, it is the vulgar and jejune Thomas Friedman who has been peddling this rubbish, which has alas been picked up by equally ignorant and self-deceiving Arab intellectuals I don’t need to mention any names here who have seen in the atrocities of 9/11 a sign that the Arab and Islamic worlds are somehow more diseased and more dysfunctional than any other, and that terrorism is a sign of a wider distortion that has occurred in any other culture.
We can leave to one side that, between them, Europe and the US account for by far the largest number of violent deaths during the 20th century, the Islamic world hardly a fraction of it. And behind all of that specious unscientific nonsense about wrong and right civilizations, there is the grotesque shadow of the great false prophet Samuel Huntington who has led a lot of people to believe that the world can be divided into distinct civilizations battling against each other forever. On the contrary, Huntington is dead wrong on every point he makes. No culture or civilization exists by itself; none is made up of things like individuality and enlightenment that are completely exclusive to it; and none exists without the basic human attributes of community, love, value for life and all the others. To suggest otherwise as he does is the purest invidious racism of the same stripe as people who argue that Africans have naturally inferior brains, or that Asians are really born for servitude, or that Europeans are a naturally superior race. This is a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed uniquely today against Arab and Muslims, and we must be very firm as to not even go through the motions of arguing against it. It is the purest drivel. On the other hand, there is the much more credible and serious stipulation that, like every other instance of humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent value and dignity which are expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style, and those expressions needn’t resemble or be a copy of one approved model suitable for everyone to follow.
The whole point about human diversity is that it is in the end a form of deep co-existence between very different styles of individuality and experience that can’t all be reduced to one superior form: this is the spurious argument foisted on us by pundits who bewail the lack of development and knowledge in the Arab world. All one has to do is to look at the huge variety of literature, cinema, theater, painting, music and popular culture produced by and for Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that needs to be assessed as an indication of whether or not Arabs are developed, and not just how on any given day statistical tables of industrial production either indicate an appropriate level of development or they show failure.
The more important point I want to make, though, is that there is a very wide discrepancy today between our cultures and societies and the small group of people who now rule these societies. Rarely in history has such power been so concentrated in so tiny a group as the various kings, generals, sultans, and presidents who preside today over the Arabs. The worst thing about them as a group, almost without exception, is that they do not represent the best of their people. This is not just a matter of no democracy. It is that they seem to radically underestimate themselves and their people in ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and fearful of change, frightened of opening up their societies to their people, terrified most of all that they might anger big brother, that is, the United States. Instead of seeing their citizens as the potential wealth of the nation, they regard them all as guilty conspirators vying for the ruler’s power.
This is the real failure, how during the terrible war against the Iraqi people, no Arab leader had the self- dignity and confidence to say something about the pillaging and military occupation of one of the most important Arab countries. Fine, it was an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein’s appalling regime is no more, but who appointed the US to be the Arab mentor? Who asked the US to take over the Arab world allegedly on behalf of it citizens and bring it something called “democracy,” especially at a time when the school system, the health system, and the whole economy in America are degenerating into the worst levels since the 1929 Depression. Why was the collective Arab voice NOT raised against the US’s flagrantly illegal intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation upon the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure in nerve, in dignity, in self- solidarity.
With all the Bush administration’s talk about guidance from the Almighty, doesn’t one Arab leader have the courage just to say that, as a great people, we are guided by our own lights and traditions and religion? But nothing, not a word, as the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeals and the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified that his country may be next. How unfortunate the embrace of George Bush, the man whose war destroyed an Arab country gratuitously, by the combined leadership of the major Arab countries last week. Was there no one there who had the guts to remind George W. what he has done to humiliate and bring more suffering to the Arab people than anyone before him, and must he always be greeted with hugs, smiles, kisses and low bows? Where is the diplomatic and political and economic support necessary to sustain an anti- occupation movement on the West Bank and Gaza? Instead all one hears is that foreign ministers preach to the Palestinians to mind their ways, avoid violence, and keep at the peace negotiations, even though it has been so obvious that Sharon’s interest in peace is just about zero. There has been no concerted Arab response to the separation wall, or to the assassinations, or to collective punishment, only a bunch of tired clichés repeating the well-worn formulas authorized by the State Department.
Perhaps the one thing that strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to grasp the dignity of the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little political support among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat, Israel, and the US precisely because he has no constituency, is not an orator or a great organizer, or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasir Arafat, and because I am afraid they see in him a man who will do Israel’s bidding, how could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to pronounce words written for him, like a ventriloquist’s puppet, by some State Department functionary, in which he commendably speaks about Jewish suffering but then amazingly says next to nothing about his own people’s suffering at the hands of Israel? How could he accept so undignified and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget his self-dignity as the representative of a people that has been fighting heroically for its rights for over a century just because the US and Israel have told him he must? And when Israel simply says that there will be a “provisional” Palestinian state, without any contrition for the horrendous amount of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer sadistic systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian, man, woman, child, I must confess to a complete lack of understanding. As to why a leader or representative of that long-suffering people doesn’t so much as take note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity?
Has he forgotten that since he is not just an individual but also the bearer of his people’s fate at an especially crucial moment? Is there anyone who was not bitterly disappointed at this total failure to rise to the occasion and stand with dignity the dignity of his people’s experience and cause and testify to it with pride, and without compromise, without ambiguity, without the half embarrassed, half apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders take when they are begging for a little kindness from some totally unworthy white father?
But that has been the behavior of Palestinian rulers since Oslo and indeed since Haj Amin, a combination of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication. Why on earth do they always think it absolutely necessary to read scripts written for them by their enemies? The basic dignity of our life as Arabs in Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and here in America, is that we are our own people, with a heritage, a history, a tradition and above all a language that is more than adequate to the task of representing our real aspirations, since those aspirations derive from the experience of dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on each Palestinian since 1948. Not one of our political spokespeople the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser’s time ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go.
Slowly, however, the situation is changing, and the old regime made up of the Abu Mazens and Abu Ammars of this world, is passing and will gradually be replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. The most promising is made up of the members of the National Palestinian Initiative; they are grass roots activists whose main activity is not pushing papers on a desk, nor juggling bank accounts, nor looking for journalists to pay attention to them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the working classes, and young intellectuals and activists, the teachers, doctors, lawyers, working people who have kept society going while also fending off daily Israeli attacks. Second, these are people committed to the kind of democracy and popular participation undreamt of by the Authority, whose idea of democracy is stability and security for itself. Lastly, they offer social services to the unemployed, health to the uninsured and the poor, proper secular education to a new generation of Palestinians who must be taught the realities of the modern world, not just the extraordinary worth of the old one. For such programs, the NPI stipulates that getting rid of the occupation is the only way forward, and that in order to do that, a representative national unified leadership be elected freely to replace the cronies, the outdated, and the ineffectiveness that have plagued Palestinian leaders for the past century.
Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and Americans, and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people wounded with her from ISM, Tom Hurndall and Brian Avery, have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.
I conclude with one last irony. Isn’t it astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire and respect us more than we do ourselves? Isn’t it time we caught up with our own status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere realize, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologize for or anything to be embarrassed about? On the contrary, they should be proud of what their people have done and proud also to represent them.
Edward Said is a professor at Columbia University
