Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: Bush's Mideast Vision

Bush's Mideast Vision is a Myopic Fantasy by Eric
Margolis
Published on Sunday, June 30, 2002 in the Toronto Sun
NEW YORK -- It's hard to know whether to laugh or to
cry at U.S. President George Bush's much-awaited
"vision" of Mideast peace unveiled last week, a speech
so obviously crafted by special interests and driven by
domestic politics that the rest of the world winced in
embarrassment. Even moderate Israeli leader Shimon
Peres called it a "fatal mistake."
The view abroad was captured by veteran British
journalist Robert Fisk, who acidly wrote that Israeli
PM Ariel Sharon, who has made six visits to Bush's
White House, should be allowed to run the White House
press office, to "spare the American president the
ignominy of parroting everything he is told by the
Israelis."
Bush's message to Palestinians: basically, no state
until you kick out Yasser Arafat, stop resisting
Israeli occupation, develop true democracy, do what
Israel tells you, create capitalism, eliminate
corruption and stop causing trouble. Then, some day,
the U.S. might consider an "interim" Palestinian state
whose borders and sovereignty would be "provisional,"
provided Israel agrees.
Bush might as well have told Palestinians they won't
get their freedom and homeland until they can recite
the U.S. Tax Code in Apache.
Bush, a man untroubled by deep thought or irony, had
the chutzpah, as we New Yorkers say, to urge
Palestinians to adopt Scandinavian-style democracy,
while telling them they cannot re-elect Arafat, who was
elected in a fair vote by over 80% of his people -
rather better than President Bush, who slid into office
thanks to court orders and voter exclusions in Florida.
As for corruption, Arafat's thieving PLO cronies look
like the homeless compared to Bush's mega-crook pals at
Enron who helped finance his elections.
Corrupt autocracies
Why didn't Bush urge free elections on America's other
Mideast clients - Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco
and the Gulf states, mostly corrupt autocracies run by
generals or feudal monarchs? What the president wants
is an obedient Palestinian version of Afghanistan's new
leader, CIA "asset" Hamid Karzai, who was put into
power with U.S. and British bayonets and billions in
bribes.
Bush politely suggested Israel stop building
settlements. Considering that Sharon scorned Bush when
the president ordered him to pull his U.S.-armed and
financed troops out of the West Bank, there is zero
chance Israel will stop gobbling it up. Sharon has made
it perfectly clear by his actions that he will never
withdraw from the West Bank or Golan, which Israel
occupies illegally, and will never accept a viable
Palestinian state. Worse, Sharon appears likely to be
succeeded by rival Benjamin Netanyahu, who actually
calls Sharon "soft" on Palestinians.
What Bush and Israel's rightists want is
apartheid-style bantustans - tribal reservations
policed by Palestinian kapos, surrounded by Israeli
troops, covering about 40% of Palestine. Israel will
get the rest. In fact, Israeli peace groups recently
revealed there are now 400,000 Jewish settlers in the
Occupied Territories and Golan, not the 200,000
previously believed. When the Oslo Accords were signed
in 1993, there were 85,000 Jewish settlers.
Arafat's U.S.-financed Palestinian Authority and its
security apparatus are dictatorial, thoroughly corrupt
and abuse human rights. Arafat winks at terror attacks
on Israeli civilians, is a liability to his people and
should make way for new leadership. But so should
Sharon and Israel's expansionists, who have plunged
their nation into a bloody morass and provoked
anti-Semitism around the globe. A pox on both houses.
Israel, at least, has moderate, capable alternative
leaders like Peres and Yossi Beilin, who can bring some
sanity to the political scene. The only real
Palestinian candidate, Marawan Barghouti, is in an
Israel prison. The PLO is totally discredited among
Palestinians because of corruption and close
co-operation with the U.S. and Israel. This leaves the
extremist groups - Hamas and Islamic Jihad - as the
choice of a majority of Palestinians. Bush's relentless
undermining of Arafat's PLO has strengthened
Palestinian radicals and played into the hands of
Sharon, who vows he will never deal with "terrorists."
Israelis and their American supporters greeted Bush's
speech with predictable adulation. Bush and his
advisers hope to increase their share of the Jewish
vote in November's critical U.S. mid-term elections
from 19% to over 50%. Embracing Israel's far right also
delighted ardent Bush supporters on the Christian far
right. Many of these rustic fundamentalists believe
that when all Jews are moved into Biblical Israel
(including the West Bank), their Christian Messiah will
return and destroy the world in Armageddon. Good
Christians will then go to paradise.
President Bush's "vision" for Palestine is a myopic
fantasy seen through rose-colored glasses supplied by
his alter ego, Ariel Sharon. The plan is frightful news
for Palestinians, bad news for Israelis seeking peace,
and bad news for Americans.
Bush has put domestic politics and his re-election
before America's proper national interests. He has
undermined real peacemakers among the Israelis and
Arabs. Worse, instead of playing honest peace broker in
the Mideast, Bush's total identification with Israel's
far right ensures America will again become the target
of extremists from an increasingly enraged Muslim world
- and of furious Palestinians who now have nothing to
lose except the cruel mirage of a fraudulent
"provisional interim" state.
Copyright © 2002, Canoe, a division of Netgraphe Inc

thanks to court orders and voter exclusions in Florida.
la quoto solo perchè imperdibile, e non vorrei qualcuno se la fosse,
appunto, persa   :-)
vanz
--
"It came with a black dude but it kept being pulled over"
MIB II