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Today on Flashpoints:
An Encore Presentation of Late Palestinian Visionary, Edward
Said: His Speech in Berkeley February 2003
5:01 PM PST
My topic is "Palestine and the Universality of Human
Rights".
"This is a very fraught moment to be speaking about
human rights in the Middle East and those of the Palestinians
in particular. But it does seem to me a symbolically useful
time, for the purposes of my lecture. The US has already sent
a hugely intimidating military force to various Arab and non
Arab countries in the region surrouding Iraq. The frankly
imperial idea behind that is to disarm Iraq forcibly and also
change it's dreadful regime. The rest of the international
community, not least most of the Arab countries of the region
and permanent members of the security council has been expressing
varying degrees of disquite and occasionally urgent disapproval.
Although it is also clear that most governments in the Arab
world are too unpopular and intimidated to do anything but
to go along. Certainly its the case that no one outside of
Iraq has suggested any iota of concern about Saddam Hussein
and his government. It is the people of Iraq who stand to
suffer the most and whose double and triple miserable fate
is of the deepest interest to people all over the world. I'm
sorry to say that none of this has had the slightest effect
on what is a granitic will on the part of a tiny number of
members of George Bush's administration to go forward with
plans for a war among whose stated imperial intentions is
the unilateral wish to bring American style democracy to Iraq
and the Arab world: redrawing maps, overturning governments
and states and modes of life on a fantastically wide scale
in the process.
That all this has very little to do with the enhancement
of human rights in a part of the world especially rife with
their abuse is patently obvious. Were Iraq to have been the
world's largest exporter of oranges or apples there would
have been no concern over its purported possesions of Weapons
of Mass Destruction, or its extradinary cruel and tyranical
regime. This is a war planned for resources and for strategic
control. And if or not it occurs, the US has at the very least
asserted it's strategic dominance over the center of the worlds
largest known energy reserves from the Gulf to the Caspian
Sea and plans to reshape the area by pacifying threats to
it's dominance in countries like Syria, Iran and some of the
Gulf Emirates.
To threaten war with such beligerence and such a wasteful
deployment of military resources is an abuse of human tolerance
and human values. That it might in the end only turn out to
be only a display rather than an actual use of force, only
deepens anxiety about the kind of world we are moving toward...
As against those mighty facts, where the people are prevented
from getting an education, or from being allowed to move,
express themselves and organize freely without fear, either
of intimidation, collective punishment or straight right assassination
may seem threrfore like relatively humdrum or trivial issues.
But they do pertain with a frightening parallelism to both
the people of Palestine and the people of Iraq. In either
and both cases my point here is to assert to the universal
applicability of human rights to those unfortunate people.
Given that since World War II there has grown up an impressive,
even formidable world-wid concensus that each individual or
collectivity no matter his or her color, ethnicity, religion
or culture is to be protected from such horrific practices
as starvation, torture, forced transfer of population, discrimination
on the basis of religion or ethnos, humiliation, extra-judicial
political assassinations, land expropriations, and all manner
of similar cruel and unusual punishment.
I want to affirm also, that no power, no matter how special,
or how developed, or how strong or how urgent its claims of
past victimization is exempt from accusation and judgemnt
if that government practices such things. And finally, no
people or individuals can be singled out as exceptions to
these general rules so as to be considered in fact liable
for such abbregations of human rights as those I've mentioned.
Once big powers start to dream of regime change, a process
already begun by the Perle's and Wolfowitz's of this country
there is simply no end in sight. Isn't it outrageous that
people of such a dubious caliber actually go on blathering
about bringing democracy, modernization and liberaliztion
to the Middle East? Heaven knows that the area needs it, as
so many Arab and Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people
have said over and over.
But who appointed these characters as agents of progress
anyway? And what entitles them to pontificate in so shameless
a way when there are already so many injustices and abuses
in our own country, to be remedied!
It's particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified
a person as it is imaginable to be on any subject touching
on democracy and justice should have been an election adviser
to Benjamin Netenyahoo's extreme right wing government in
which he counseled the right wing Israeli to scrap any and
all peace attempts to annex the West Bank and Gaza and try
to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible. This man,
and his collegues now talk about bring democracy to the Middle
East, and does so without provoking the slightest objection
from any of the media pundits who politely if not abjectly
quiz him on national television.
Colin Powell's speech at the UN, despite its many weaknesses,
its plaguerized and manufactured evidence, its confected audio
tapes - which anybody who knows Arabic knows is completely
senseless, as well as its doctored pictures, is correct in
one thing: Saddam Hussein's regime has violated numerous human
rights and UN resolutions. There could be no arguing about
that and no excuses. But what is so tremendously hypocritical
about the official US position is that literally everything
that Powell has accussed the Iraqi Bathis of, has been the
stock and trade of every Israeli government since 1948.
And at no time, more flagrantly since the Occupation of 1967.
Torture, illegal detention, assassination, assaults against
civilians with missles, helicopters and jet fighters . The
annexation of territory, the transportation of civilians from
one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, mass
killings as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatila to mention only
the most obvious. The denial of rights to free passage and
unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of
civilians for human shields, humiliation, punishment of families,
house demolations on a mass scale, destruction of agricultural
land , expropriation of water, illegal settlements, economic
pulperization, attacks on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances,
the killing of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous
abuses.
All these it should be noted with empahsis have been carried
on with the total, unconditional support of the United States,
which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such
practices, and every kind of military and intelligence aid,
but has also given Israel upwards of 135 BILLION Dollars in
economic aid on a scale that beggers the relative amount per
capita spent by our government on its own citizens.
This is an unconciousable record to hold against the US,
and the Secretary of State as its human symbol in practice.
As a person in charge of the US foreign policy it is his specific
responsibility to uphold the laws of this country and to make
sure the enforcement of human rights and the promotion of
freedom is applied uniformly without exception or condition.
How he and his coworkers can stand up before the world and
rightously sermonize against Iraq, while at the same time
completely ignoring the ongoing American partnership in human
rights abuses with Israel - defies credibility. Yet no one,
in all the justified critiques of the US position that have
appeared since Powell gave his great UN speech has focused
on this point. And that is what I want to do this evening..."
"Just as I feel as an American, that the United States
has not been divinely endowed with a special errand into the
wilderness, and that its positions are endorsed by God, I
feel that it is my moral and intellectual duty to oppose its
unjust use of its immense military, economic and political
power abroad for what is, it claims falsely to be, its national
security interst. I have no power, so I must resort to the
tools of education, to writing and speaking..."
Thus begins Edward Said's February 2003 Speech in Berkeley.
Today, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon defended Army Lt. Gen William
Boykin's speech at evangelical Christian churches while in
uniform regarding the war on terrorism: "I knew that
my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real
God, and that his was an idol"... Boykin is Deputy Undersecretary
of Defense for Integlligence.
For Full Text Refer: www.indymedia.com
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