War Machine -- Marx

--- You can be late through speed -- Negotiations. Remember that book --
well its the name of the book by Deleuze -- always political -- being is
political they say in M/P.

Dan-- the
	War Machine is all over the M/P volume.
Nomad chapter refers to this idea constantly

	The silence about the deaths of others can be deafening. In any
event I am forwarding this article by the great journalist Robert Fisk. he
is a marvelous writer who has lived in Beirut for over 20 years The first
book of his that I had was Pity the Nation -- the fall of Lebanon which
chrronicles his experiences as a journalist in Lebanon, Palestine and
various other locales. it might interest some of you to know he begins the
book in Auswchitz.. sorry I can never spell that word. Also for those of
you with an interest in Ireland his first book is about Irish neutrality
in WW2.

-- Daniel - I see where you are coming from but I cannot agree with you.--
There is always room to act - it is a questtion of where and how.

:astly  Sean-- I want to thank you for your very interesting post. I am
not so sure that I amin agreement wth everything that you state about the
working class and the struggle for a country for the Palestinians. Every
Palestinian that I have read, and every Palestinain that I know personally
and every Palestinian that Ihave spokenn to  wants a country first. What
becomes of that country and what becoems of Israel as well, well all of
that will be very interesting, and it is nice to dream of that day, and
more than that, it will be very intense if an d when that day comes....
How shall they live together. Edward Said in a recent essay has suggested
a Truth and Reconciliation committee when the time comes. He invokes
Mandela. I think this is an amazing vision. -- The idea of such a
meeting is  also well within the
reach of the great Judaic traditions of mercy above justicee and is linked
to the prophetic vision of justice and mercy for all the people of Elohim/
-- Elohim is the highest noton of the godhead in the Jewish tradition and
is the higher power of Yawhehe -- the one  who is a  jealous God. And one
can say the moree militant deity of the tribe..  In Islam there is also
the Sufi tradition, andthere are of course many other strands which can
link together to reconcile -- and this can link the secular and the
religious territories together intoa  pra tical ensemble
Now one cannot  deny or rather leave out  the religious aspect
ofthe conflict, and surely one can utilize -- and there are the ideas of
Levinas -- his notionthat we are responsibel for theother as soon as we
see his face -- this cld. be one template where by differing groups could
eventually meet to speak and reconcile  --- I am suggesting that the
the best, most useful and practical ideas ofthese traditions, the Jewish,
the Christian and Muslim will all be useful in the years ahead..These are
just small particles that start in some direction of the positive.
----
But in the meantime -- Yes, the Palestinians want and need and deserve
their country and not just a patch of  it. So we dreamof a future -- a
perhaps people becoming?? perhaps the future of a people made of three
branches which becomethe rhizome of immanence and as the Occident
overcomes its hatred of the Earth -- and sees the Orient for what it is
and for the inverted mirror of its own fears and hatreds.

-- There are I think about 40 million Christian fundamentalists in the USA
who are also partially to blame for this mad scenario in the Middle East.

-- Thatis somethingt o think about -- yes, Dan handing out leaflets can
change one local line of the molecule in your flight path. The line of
flight is not the dromos of Virilio. Buta line of existential action.
Create it in your life , in mine.

-- I agree that theory and praxis -- practice if you will are all a part
of the same machine = the question is how they are situated for each
person. The split between betokens the protestant madness which capitalism
is at least partially responsibel aas well as being an offshoot of. And
the capitalist machine is the decoder which mashes all the codes sparing
nothing and no one as we learned from  Antioedipus. vol 1 of Capitalism
and Schizphrenia --

For Palestinians -- who have experienced a type of absolute
deterritorialization -- the terror of it, the Nakba of their homeland, all
ofthis is a first hand experience.   ----

In any caase Sean -- its great to see your ideas to the list --

The list can generate movement in all sorts of directioons.... from comedy
to joy to change in bodies here and there -- tjhe virtual and the real.
The reseau ofthe rhizome is not limited to our heads -- but to the
changing  of tis alienations.

-
Regards -- More later -- Clifford
______________________________________________
The Independent / UK December 13, 2000

I Am Being Vilified For Telling The Truth About Palestinians

'The abuse being directed at anyone who dares to criticise Israel is
reaching McCarthyite proportions'

by Robert Fisk


In the Middle East jungle, a journalist has to expect a few sticks and
stones. A Bahrain newspaper cartoonist once depicted me as a rabid dog
(fit, of course, for extermination), and Cairo's most lickspittle
columnist  called me "a crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt".

But the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at  anyone
- academic, analyst, reporter - who dares to criticise Israel (or  dares
to tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching
McCarthyite proportions. Take Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian
academic who is a professor at Columbia University.

He has been facing unprecedented abuse from the Zionist  Organisation of
America, which last year demanded that he be fired from  the Modern
Language Association and which now demands on an almost  daily basis his
dismissal from his professorship at Columbia - solely  because he points
out, with clinical ferocity and painful accuracy, the  historical tragedy
of Palestinian dispossession, the brutality of Israel's  continued
occupation and the bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement.  Columbia
University has issued an unprecedented public defence of Said  and "the
fundamental values of a great university", quoting John Stuart  Mill and
adding that to give way to the Jewish lobby's demand would be  "a threat
to us all and to academic freedom".

Too true. Noam Chomsky - himself Jewish - is one of the most  profound
philosophers of our age, but his scathing reviews of the Israeli
occupation and America's blind, unquestioning support for Israel now  earn
him ever more ruthless abuse. In the United States, he wrote  recently, a
whole population is kept in ignorance of the facts because "the  economic
and and military programmes (of Israel) rely crucially on US  support,
which is domestically unpopular and would be far more so if its  purposes
were known."

Ignorance of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered to in the US  that
only a few tiny newspapers report anything other than Israel's point of
view. You won't find Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put very  well
by Charlie Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel - note the
boondocks location - when he wrote that "Palestinians won't get their
independence until Americans get theirs".

But the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is now
international. We must say that Israel is under siege by Palestinians
(rather than occupying Palestinian land), that Palestinians are
responsible  for the violence (even though Palestinians are the principal
victims), that  Arafat turned down a good deal at Camp David (though he
was offered  just over 60 per cent of his land, not 94 per cent), and that
Palestinians  indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why the
Israeli troops have  shot so many Palestinian children).

Israeli ambassadors and Israel's lobbyists have never been such  frequent
visitors to European newspaper offices, to complain about  reports or
reporters, sometimes in a quite disgraceful manner. The  Johannesburg Star
- a sister paper of The Independent which carries my  own Middle East
reports - was confronted by one pro-Israeli group this  year which claimed
that I was in some way assisting the right-wing  historian David Irving -
someone I have never met and never wish to  meet. They subsequently
withdrew their allegation.

Then an odd thing happened in Ireland - at a prize-giving ceremony in
memory of a Belfast journalist. Mark Sofer, Israel's ambassador in Dublin,
had been invited to talk about reporting in conflict zones to journalism
students under the auspices of Co-operation Ireland, a charitable
movement dedicated to North-South relations. But at one point he chose  to
use the opportunity to attack my own reporting of the Middle East, to
suggest that it should not be read or believed. Mr Sofer is, of course,
entitled to his views - but not to air his prejudices in a charitable
forum  without allowing a right of reply. The charity has since announced
that it  "totally dissociates itself" from the ambassador's remarks. So it
should.

And yet it goes on. In South Africa, in Europe, in Australia - I still
treasure the five pages of abuse in an Australian lobby group's magazine
headlined "The Ignoble Scribe" and accusing me of a "stupor of self-
deception". Oddly, you can now learn more from the Israeli press than the
American media. The brutality of Israeli soldiers is fully covered in
Ha'aretz, which also reports on the large number of US negotiators who
are Jewish. Four years ago, a former Israeli soldier described in an
Israeli  newspaper how his men had looted a village in southern Lebanon;
when  the piece was reprinted in The New York Times, the looting episode
was  censored out of the text.

So here's just one final question. If Arab ambassadors and lobbyists
behaved like their Israeli opposite numbers, would we listen to them?
Would we respect them? Would we run for cover and print only one side  of
the story? Would we hell.