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Bush
Parrots Israeli Government Instructions: Fisk
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“I
wonder why Bush doesn't let Sharon run his press office,”
asked Fisk. |
LONDON,
June 26 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) -Bush reads the Israeli
government press handouts and accurately quotes them to his American
people, said Middle East correspondent for the London-based daily
newspaper, The Independent, commenting on U.S. President
George W. Bush Middle East speech.
Robert
Fisk, in his article entitled: “Robert Fisk: I wonder why Bush
doesn't let Sharon run his press office,” published in the Independent
Wednesday, June 26, said that “Ariel Sharon wants the destruction/
liquidation/ resignation of [Palestinian President] Yasser Arafat. So
does Mr. Bush.”
Fisk
says that according to Bush’s speech, there will be no Palestinian
state unless Arafat goes, and he wonders why there were no Bush
conditions for Israel.
“He
[Bush] did not secure an end to the continuing building of Jewish
settlements for Jews, and Jews only, on Arab [that is somebody else's]
land. Nor did he secure a halt to continuing Israeli military
‘incursions’ how I love that word ‘incursions’,” said
Fisk.
Fisk
highlights the identical wordings of Bush and Sharon speeches
concerning Palestinian elections.
“Mr.
Sharon, in his highly mendacious demand for Palestinian
‘transparency’, has demanded Palestinian reform must be neither
cosmetic nor an attempt to preserve Arafat. And what does Mr. Bush
say? Why, that Palestinian reform ‘must be more than cosmetic
changes or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo’.”
Fisk
wonders why “doesn't Mr. Bush let Ariel Sharon run the White House
press bureau? Not only would it be more honest; we would at least be
hearing the voice of Israel at first hand, but it would spare the
American President the ignominy of parroting everything he is told by
the Israelis.”
He
also explained that there has never been an “interim” state, let
alone a “provisional” state, adding that these are fantasies of
the Israelis and Bush.
“White
House ‘officials’, we can guess who they are, believe a
Palestinian state can be ‘achieved’ within 18 months. Let's forget
international law provides for no such entity,” he added.
Fisk
also discussed what he called the “most crucial and most dishonest
part of the Bush statement” - the part in which the American
President said: “When the Palestinian people have new leaders, new
institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the
United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian
state, whose border and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be
provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle
East.”
“Let's
see what this means,” said Fisk. “When the Palestinians have
elected a leader whom the Israelis want, a condition that could go
on to the crack of doom, the Americans will support a Palestinian
state whose very existence will mean nothing unless Israel approves
what that state wants to do,” he added.
“In
other words, the United States will be Israel's spokesman in any
negotiations. A growing number of Americans know they are being
suckered by their own government and their own press, that their
country's foreign policy is being manipulated to give maximum support
to one, and only one, country in the Middle East. So will ‘certain
aspects of its sovereignty’. Note these weighty words. ‘Certain
aspects’ of its sovereignty,” he said.
Do
these “certain aspects” include the continuation of illegal Jewish
settlement building, asked Fisk. Or the absence of any international
guarantees for this interim/provisional state? Or perhaps a get-out
clause for the United States to wash its hands of the whole shebang if
Israel decides to annex the entire West Bank?
Fisk
further noted the weasel words: “Palestine's borders will be
‘provisional ... until resolved as part of a final settlement in the
Middle East’. Yet, never before has an occupied people been led by
so pathetic a person as Yasser Arafat.”
But
the U.K. journalist’s sharp criticism of Bush doesn’t mean that he
supports Arafat. He recalled that nineteen years ago, this same Arafat
swore to him, on a hilltop above the Lebanese city of Tripoli, that
his “Palestine” would be a democracy among the guns.”
“His
Palestine, he told me, would be unlike any other Arab state. There
would be no secret policemen, no ‘regime’, no cronyism, no
corruption.”
In
1998, Fisk said, a French diplomat, who returned from Gaza after
delivering a personal letter to Arafat from French President Jacques
Chirac, said that Arafat disregarded the letter, only interested in
when the new French school in Gaza will open.
“One
of Arafat's relatives will be the headmistress of this school. Family
before nation. The Chirac letter stays unopened,” Fisk added.
Fisk
also described Nabil Shaath as one of the most loyal and obsequious of
Arafat's ministers, and he quoted his words that “a state is a
state, and you cannot be provisionally pregnant and you cannot have a
provisional state.”
It
might have been wiser, and more honest, Fisk said, if Shaath had
reminded us that “the CIA trained the gunmen and intelligence thugs
who worked for Arafat; if he had outlined the imprisonment and torture
that Arafat inflicted on his Palestinian opponents with the complicity
of those who supported the ‘peace process’.”
However,
Fisk said that Arafat did not fail in his duties as a Palestinian
leader, but he failed in his duties as Israel's, and thus America's,
proxy colonial apparatchik in the West Bank and Gaza.
“The
fact he is a corrupt little despot does not change this. He was given
time to prove his loyalty to the West, to America, to Israel. He was
supposed to have made Israel's settlements both safe and sacred,” he
added.
“Now,
when he can no longer control the people he was supposed to control -
remember the BBC's repeated question: ‘Can he control his own
people?’ - his usefulness is at an end. He must go, to be replaced
by our choice of leader. Forget elections, who will be as democratic
as the new Afghan ‘interim’ government,” Fisk said.
Fisk
concluded his article by saying that “George Bush insulted the
Palestinians and enraged the leadership of the Arab world. Who cares
about the latter? Most of them were appointed by us. But I have a
feeling that the Palestinians will not accept this nonsense.”
That
is exactly why they will be condemned, as never before, as
“terrorists”, he added .
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