ZGram - 2/3/2002 - "Edward Said's article in this week's Al Ahram"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

February 3, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

In the post-9/11 atmosphere, it has become almost "unpatriotic" to tell
things the way they are!  Calling a spade a spade used to be a tradition
among American patriots for almost a hundred years - until the new, moneyed
elite of bankers and industrialists willfully overthrew America's wisely
shaped foreign policy direction against the dire warnings of America's
first President, George Washington, not to get entangled in foreign
alliances, not to favor one nation's cause over another.  With America's
intervention in the Philippines, Cuba and Europe in two ghastly wars, in
Korea, Vietnam and dozens of other places, America's troubles became
global.  The events of 9/11 brought that home more brutally, and more
graphically, than anyone of us could have imagined in our worst nightmares.


I was touched to the core by Edward Said's chilling article in this week's
Al Ahram, Issue No. 571.  What he says echoes in the mind, heart and soul
of every German man and woman who suffered through World War I and World
War II.  It reverberates in us in every fiber of our being.  We know where
he is coming from.  We have been there.  We are still there.  Said's very
first paragraph encapsulates the modern German story and explains why
Germans and many Europeans of the wartime generation are touched more by
the plight of the Palestinians than even the surrounding Arabs.

He writes quite correctly:

"History has no mercy.  There are no laws in it against suffering and
cruelty, no international balance that restores a people much sinned
against to their rightful place in the world.  Cyclical views of history
have always seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the
screw means that present evil can later be transformed into good."

The treatment of the Germans during the 20th century was merely a
forerunner of the treatment meted out to the Palestinians in the last
decades, and especially now.  The unconditional, massive political,
military and financial support of Stalin's Bolshevik butchers and torturers
by the Roosevelt Administration was as equally shortsighted and grotesque
as America's unconditional support of Israel in all its actions in at least
the last two or three decades.  What could possibly motivate US foreign
policy makers and shapers to be backing, condoning and excusing such
brutality against what was, for 30 years, a virtually defenseless
collection of leaderless peasants in Palestine?

Here is Edward Said's full editorial, with Zundelsite comments and a
conclusion added:

[START]

Said:

History has no mercy. There are no laws in it against suffering and
cruelty, no internal balance that restores a people much sinned against to
their rightful place in the world. Cyclical views of history have always
seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the screw means
that present evil can later be transformed into good. Nonsense. Turning
the screw of suffering means more suffering, and not a path to salvation.
The most frustrating thing about history, however, is that so much in it
escapes language, escapes attention and memory altogether. Historians have
therefore  resorted to metaphors and poetic figures to fill in the spaces,
and this is why the  first great historian, Herodotus, was also known as
the Father of Lies: so much in what he wrote embellished and, to a great
extent also, concealed the truth that it is the powers of his imagination
that make him so great a  writer, not the vast number of facts he deployed.

 Living in the United States at this moment is a terrible experience. While
the main media and the government echo each other about  the Middle East,
there are alternative views available through the Internet, the telephone,
satellite channels, and the local Arabic and Jewish press. Nevertheless, so
far as what is readily available to the average American is drowned in a
storm of media pictures and stories almost completely cleansed of anything
in foreign affairs but the patriotic line issued by the government, that
picture is a startling one. America is fighting the evils of terrorism.
America is good, and anyone  who objects is evil and anti-American.
Resistance against America, its policies, its arms and ideas is little
short of terrorist. What I find just as startling is that influential and,
in their own way, sophisticated American foreign policy analysts keep
saying that they cannot understand why the whole world (and the Arabs and
Muslims in particular) will not accept the American message, and why the
rest of the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America,
persists in its criticism of American policies in Afghanistan, for
renouncing six international treaties unilaterally, for its total,
unconditional support of Israel, for its astonishingly obdurate policy on
prisoners of war. The difference between realities as perceived by
Americans on the one hand and by the rest of the world on the other, is so
vast and irreconcilable as to defy description.

Zundelsite:

This is where Revisionism comes in handy and offers a clear lens:  These
abuses have happened before!  Paragraph Two reveals a domestic mirror image
for the Arabs today as we have of our collective German-American
observations and treatment in World War I and World War II, replete with
its illogical foreign policy of the US versus Germany for a hundred years.
The same mindset of American foreign policy analysts perplexed Kaiser
Wilhelm's Germany, as it did Adolf Hitler's only 15-20 years later - and
has had Germans shaking their heads in incredulity ever since!  What could
possibly be going on in the minds of those who formulate and execute
American foreign policy?  It is a policy diametrically opposite to American
national interests in the area.  The Arabs have the oil.  Israel only spits
in America's face as they come knocking for handouts.

The second point  to make is this:  Edward Said is correct in excoriating
the spineless, utterly corrupt and incompetent Arab regimes of the Middle
East, just as Revisionists are correct when they object to the slimy
subservience to Israel's arrogance of today's German politicians.   One can
only begin to appreciate this chasm of understanding between what serves
American interests and what harms those interests that is evident more
every day by the relentless brainwashing Americans have undergone for a
hundred years in the media, in entertainment and even in their schools and
universities by what is every day emerging more clearly as the
Globalist-Jewish agenda.

Said:

Words alone are inadequate to explain how an American secretary of state,
who presumably has all the facts at his command, can without a trace of
irony accuse Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for not doing enough against
terror and for buying 50 tons of arms to defend his people, while Israel is
supplied with everything that is most lethally sophisticated in the
American arsenal at no expense to Israel. (At the same time, it needs to be
said that PLO handling of the Karine A incident has been incompetent and
bungling beyond even its own poor standards.) Meanwhile, Israel has Arafat
locked up in his Ramallah headquarters, his people totally imprisoned,
leaders assassinated, innocents starved, the sick dying, life completely
paralyzed -- and yet the Palestinians are accused of terrorism. The idea,
much less the reality, of a 35-year military occupation has simply slid
away from the media and the US government alike. Do not be surprised
tomorrow if Arafat and his people are accused of besieging Israel while
blockading its citizens and towns. No, those are no Israeli planes bombing
Tulkarm and Jenin, those are Palestinian terrorists  wearing wings, and
those are Israeli towns being bombed.

Zundelsite:

The libraries of Israel and the world are full of accounts of illegal arms-
and ammunitions shipments to Jewish insurgents before Israel was even
founded.  Ever since, Czech Communists supplied Messerschmitt fighter
planes, German machine guns, artillery and ammunition by the shiploads!
France supplied naval frigates. Germany supplied Patton tanks, including
training of the troops in Germany - and lately state-of-the-art submarines
with atomic capability.  America and France supplied jets, rockets and
helicopter gunships, even the handcuffs and billy clubs as well as sniper
rifles - and to top it all off, the means and the know-how to build atomic
bombs!

Said:

As for Israel in the US media, its spokesmen have become so practiced at
lying, creating falsehoods the way a sausage-maker makes sausages, that
nothing is beyond them. Yesterday, I heard an Israel Defence (even the name
sticks in one's throat) Ministry official answering an American reporter's
questions about house destruction in Rafah: those were empty houses, he
said, without hesitation; they were terrorist nests used for killing
Israeli citizens; we have to defend Israeli citizens against Palestinian
terror. The journalist didn't even refer to the occupation, or to the fact
that the "citizens" were settlers. As for the several hundred poor homeless
Palestinians whose pictures appeared fleetingly in the US media after the
(American-made) bulldozers had done their demolition, they were gone from
memory and awareness completely.

Zundelsite:

Here we are talking an occupation declared illegal from the moment of
military conquest even by numerous UN resolutions for 30 years!  Said is
wrong when he calls these people "settlers" - they are foreign, imported
colonizers from the Jewish ghettos of Russia and America!

Said:

As for the Arab non-response, that has exceeded in disgrace and
shamefulness the already abysmally low standards set by our governments for
the past 50 years. Such a callous silence, such a stance of servility and
incompetence in facing the US and Israel is as astonishing and unacceptable
in their own way as what Sharon and Bush are about. Are the Arab leaders so
fearful of offending the US that they are willing to accept not only
Palestinian humiliation but their own as well? And for what? Simply to be
allowed to go on with corruption, mediocrity, and oppression. What a cheap
bargain they have made between the furtherance of their narrow interests
and American forbearance! No wonder there is scarcely an Arab alive today
for whom the word "regime" connotes more than amused contempt,
unadulterated bitterness, and (except for the circle of, advisers and
sycophants) angry alienation. At least with the recent press conferences by
high Saudi officials criticising US policy towards Israel there is a
welcome break in the silence, although the disarray and dysfunction
concerning the upcoming Arab summit continues to add to our already
well-stocked cupboard of poorly-managed incidents that demonstrate needless
disunity and posturing.

Zundelsite:

Once again, it is amazing how the average Arab man, from the casbas in
Tangier to the oil fields of Malaysia, from Tashkent to the streets of
America, feels humiliated by the inept, corrupt, slovenly behavior of the
regimes in power over them - exactly like the vast majority of Germans do
by the incessant anti-German propaganda and by the disgraceful, anti-German
conduct of Allied vassal regimes installed in Germany since 1945.

Said:

 I do think that the adjective "wicked" is the correct one here for what is
being done to the truth of the Palestinian experience of suffering imposed
by Sharon on the West Bank and Gaza collectively. That it cannot adequately
be described or narrated, that the Arabs say and do nothing in support of
the struggle, that the US is so terrifyingly hostile, that the Europeans
are (except for their recent declaration, which has no measures of
implementation in it) so useless: all this has driven many of us to
despair, I know, and to a kind of hopeless frustration that is one of the
results aimed for by Israeli officials and their US counterparts. To reduce
people to the heedlessness of not caring anymore, and to make life so
miserable as to make it seem necessary to give up life itself, comprise a
state of desperation that Sharon clearly wants. This is what he was elected
to do and what, if his policies fail, will cause him to lose his office,
whereupon Netanyahu will be brought in to try to finish the same dreadful
and inhuman (but ultimately suicidal) task.

Zundelsite:

Again, Revisionism to the fore!  What the Westernized, university-trained
Arab Said without access to the full spectrum of the real but often hidden
American and European history cannot seemingly comprehend is the witches
brew of hidden agendas, ideologies, and greed of decades past which has
produced the current state of affairs.  He does not comprehend the marriage
of convenience between religious, we-are-God's-chosen-people - zealots who
adhere to a medieval messianic cult, who wait for and worship the
Antichrist of Biblical lore - with a global gang of gangsters, fraud- and
con-artists, blackmailers, money launderers, white slavers, drug
manufacturers, drug pushers and world-wide arms merchants.  The Globalist
Mafia of the Mind has married the Mafia of the Ghettos of post-Communist
Russia, America and Europe.  These two evil forces have created for
themselves a safe-haven - in gangster jargon a "No-Go Zone" such as they
have and have had in big cities like Moscow, Minsk, Chicago, Los Angeles
and New York where they had their diaper training, where they bought off
cops, paid off judges and supplied Monica Lewinskys to politicians so that
they would be untouched by the law.

That is what Israel was created for - it is an international "No-Go Zone"
because statesmen from everywhere, even nations like Germany and America,
have been bought off, blackmailed with labels of "Racist", "Nazi" and, of
course, the so-called "Holocaust".  There are international bodies,
international treaties, and organizations like the UN, to be sure - just
like there are policemen, laws and courts in local areas - which do not
step in, do not enforce the laws, do not pursue the criminals - out of
fear!  Fear of exposure and of individual and collective reprisals!

What nation, or what individual leader will have the guts to step right
into this No-Go Zone?  A penny for your thoughts!

=====

Thought for the Day:

"The wheel is come full circle."

(Shakespeare)