Bullies
Since the end of World War II, the USA has been the biggest and toughest kid on the block, bullying mercilessly Iraq (genocide), Cuba (40 years' blockade), El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, little Grenada, Vietnam, Chile (Pinochet's ghastly regime organised with CIA help), and Libya (Reagan bombed Tripoli in 1986, killing Colonel Gaddafi's little daughter, among many others).
Now, suddenly, the US itself has become bullied — though by a much smaller bully whom it can easily overcome. Let the big bully fight his own battles without dragging in the innocent little fellows to help protect him. Is this to be Vietnam and Iraq all over again?
Howard and Ruddock have apparently sent another refugee ship back to Indonesia. No room for more people in large, empty Australia? If Howard is determined that these people must die, why not just build crematoria here, just as you-know-who did?
Rosemary Evans
St Kilda Vic
Balanced discourse
Narendra Mohan Kommalapati (Write On, GLW #470 — go to <http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2001/470/470p8.htm>) seems obsessed with labelling the Israelis and Palestinians respectively as "bad nations" and "good nations". Using binary opposites, he describes all Israeli Jews as oppressors, and all Palestinian Arabs as oppressed.
An alternative and more balanced discourse might include the following: Israel is an ethnically diverse state characterised by multiple political, religious, and national perspectives. The Israeli population includes Ashkenazi Jews (mainly from Europe), Sephardi Jews (mainly from the Middle East), African Jews from Ethiopia and Sudan, and a significant Arab minority comprised of various religions and cultures.
The large Sephardi Jewish grouping consists primarily of refugees who were expelled from Arab countries in direct retaliation for the creation of the State of Israel. For example, the mass exodus of 120,000 Jews from Iraq during 1950-51 reflected a combination of popular anti-Jewish agitation, deliberate government policies of civil and economic discrimination motivated in part by the popular identification of Jews with Communism, and the attraction of Zionism and the newly-created State of Israel.
I sincerely doubt that these Arabic-speaking Jews wish to emigrate (as advised by Kommalapati) to Europe or America. Nor would they view themselves as part of an oppressor nation.
Kommalapati suggests that the only viable solution is the destruction of Israel, and its replacement by a "secular and democratic republic". This recommendation has obvious moral and practical deficits. The moral deficit is that most people of a non-fascist persuasion would not endorse the genocide of the Israeli people. The practical deficit is that no remotely secular or democratic state has ever existed in the Arab or Muslim world.
The only possible peaceful solution for Israelis and Palestinians is two states for two peoples based on a compromise between the minimum security needs of Israel and the minimum national aspirations of Palestinians. This solution will necessitate an end to the presence of militant Jewish settlements in sovereign Palestinian territory, and equally an end to hardline proposals to return hostile Palestinian refugees to Green Line Israel.
Philip Mendes
Kew Vic
Naive
Those who believe that the war in Afghanistan is not Australia's war are naive. One only has to recognise just how interconnected the entire world is to recognise that an attack on America is an attack on Australia. The American economy is on its knees and may well take the Australian economy, and the livelihood of many thousands of ordinary Australians with it. Hundreds of thousands of Australians live and work in the US too, 23 of whom were killed in the WTC attack. Qantas flies daily to and from the US and runs the same risk as US airlines in being hijacked and used to the terrorist despicable ends.
Likewise, if Australia wishes to continue to host international sporting, cultural, and political events such as the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, CHOGM, Indy and the Rugby Union World Cup, to mention a few, then we have to accept that we may well be the target of terrorists who will seek to attack American or British interests in Australia. Such is the global nature of terrorism, in that in attacking American interests they need not be confined to the US. There are plenty of Americans living in Australia and plenty of American "targets" in this country, an attack on which will lead to many Australian casualties.
Australians must wake up and realise that our only course of action is to fight side by side with the Americans and to whole heartedly support Australian and allied military action as it is the only way we can ever hope to defend ourselves from the scourge of terrorism. Above all we must support our brave men and women, both now and when they return.
Benjamin James Morgan
Bardon Qld
From Green Left Weekly, November 14, 2001.
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