Melville Cooke They were led by Ho Chi Minh. This is a little-known fact; these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom. Yet our government refused to recognise them. President Truman said they were not ready for independence. So we fell victim as a nation at that time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for all of these years. Martin Luther King Jnr., April 4, 1967, Manhattan's Riverside Church, USA
PRESIDENT TRUMAN may be long dead and Americans may still be trying to quell their shame over Vietnam with stupidness like Rambo, who never reloads his gun, and "We Were Soldiers", but the "deadly arrogance" continues.
That son of a Bush is alive and kicking and has declared that the United States will not accept Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader, even if he wins the January 2003 elections.
Mr. Arafat, elected as Palestinian leader with 87 per cent of the vote in 1996 in an election declared free and fair by international observers, responded thus on June 25:
"Mr. Bush is tainted by his association with Jim Crow-style selective disenfranchisement and executive strong-arm tactics in a southeastern province controlled by his brother. Our count shows that he would have lost the election if many thousands of African-Americans, an oppressed minority, were not deprived of the right to vote. He is not the man to bring peace to the Middle East."
In other words, George Bush and his family stole the Presidency of the United Sates of America and don't have a moral leg to stand on. That seems fair to me.
Even more to the point, the only persons who have the right to decide who they wish to lead them are those who constitute the electoral body. George Bush and his frustrated mass murderer friend Sharon are not a part of the Palestinian people and have absolutely no right to advise or suggest, much less dictate, who should lead the Palestinian people.
What does Bush want to do? Prop up an unpopular leader, leading to internal dissatisfaction and unrest, which he will then march into and sort out the natives?
Has he not learned anything from Cuba of 1898 and 1933? Is he not learning from Afghanistan of 2002, where Hamid Karzai, an import "elected" by a flawed, fraudulent, US-friendly process is far from being the safest man in the world?
I find it a bit amusing that Israel is determined to boot CNN from its cable service because of its biased coverage. They must be getting something vastly different from the crap that crosses my television screen 24 hours a day. The BBC is getting its share of flak as well.
However, the emphasis on CNN may have been sparked by a question Ted Turner asked in an item in The Guardian in June of this year. "Aren't the Israelis and the Palestinians both terrorising each other? The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have. The Israelis- they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists. I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism."
That seems fair enough to me but not to the Israelis, who called Turner "stupid". Beware he who cannot accept a shred of criticism, even when it is shared between both parties in a particular conflict.
But it is strange, because The Guardian also informs us on April 16 that academic research shows British television news routinely biased towards the Israeli view of the conflict. So much so that in a sample group of 300 persons, only 9 per cent knew that Israel was the occupying force.
SHHH, GEORGE
I had not noticed it before, but an esteemed colleague at the Gleaner's Western Bureau pointe0ligent. One of his more recent outbursts was calling the Muslim religion evil which his forked tongues hastened to correct.
But what do you expect from someone who waved at Stevie Wonder?
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably to the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America, July 4, 1776
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
