The Middle East According to Robert Fisk

COOPER: In your public speeches, you have been suggesting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might turn into something as apocalyptic as the French-Algerian war of four decades ago -- a horrendous war that took well over a million lives. Are things that dark?

ROBERT FISK: I think we already have reached those depths. If you go back and read the narrative history of the Algerian war, you'll see it began with isolated acts of sabotage, a few killings of French settlers, followed invariably by large-scale retaliation by the French authorities at which point, starting in the '60s, the Algerians began a campaign against French citizens in Algiers and Oran with bombs in cinemas and discotheques, which today translates into pizzerias and nightclubs in Israel. The French government kept saying it was fighting a war on terrorism, and the French army went in and erased whole Algerian villages. Torture became institutionalized, as it has by the Israeli authorities. Collaborators were killed by Algerian fighters, just as Arafat does so brazenly now. At the end of the day, life became insupportable for both sides.
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thanks to Unknown News

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Lives in ruins
As Israeli forces pull out of the West Bank city of Ramallah, the truth about what happened there is beginning to emerge. A distinguished Palestinian poet describes living under siege

I decided to wait for the soldiers in my bed. I was not afraid for myself: the time of fear passed away 18 months ago, when I underwent surgery for cancer of the colon. I felt as though I had been granted extra time to accomplish little things in my life.

I now play with this extra time without fear, but I worry about my 15-year-old son. They are arresting males between the ages of 15 and 50. They humiliate and interrogate them and send them to prison. They are hunting a whole generation, not the list of 100 or 200 so-called wanted terrorists. I have tried to keep my son away from politics. Politics is blood and prison for us. But I couldn't stop him from reaching the age of 15. He is therefore threatened, although his face is very childlike, in spite of the black line under his nose. I thought of persuading him to shave to make him look younger, but I didn't because I've always asked him to take care of that young moustache. If I had asked him to shave it would have planted fear in his head.
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Israel’s Hamas

The mantra that Arafat crack down on terror has always been a fraud. Who is to do this cracking down? Obviously, Palestinian police, security forces and courts. But they are the chief target of Sharon’s murderous onslaught. Sharon’s strategy today is the same as it was in Beirut in 1982. He wants to destroy and discredit the Palestinian Authority so as to ensure the Palestinians are left without a credible leadership. Chaos and anarchy on the West Bank would then provide Israel with the justification it needs to drive out the indigenous population and render the territory governable.

This has been longstanding Israeli policy. Starting in the late 1970s Israel helped build up the most fanatical and intolerant fundamentalist Muslims as rivals to the nationalist PLO. The terrorist organization Hamas is largely an Israeli creation. A UPI story last year quoted a U.S. government official as saying: "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place."
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thanks to al jensen at American Samizdat

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Beware of this ignorant and dangerous view

The concept that Islam is an intrinsically violent opponent of progress in the world is both ignorant and dangerous. The new prominence of this idea in America provides a good measure of the distorted information that exists in our political environment. It's almost as though the bloody, parochial views of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on the nature of Palestinians has been exalted to a worldview worthy of every statesman's consideration.

How easily we forget that the history of organized Christianity provides probably the bloodiest tale in all of human history.
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thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!

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This Modern World
A Scientific Explanation of the Mid-East Crisis