Blood = Brothers

salam calayakum. I would just say briefly that i disagree with both of you, and i think that ur both abit confussed about this issue. Feminism, in its current form, is something that started early in the last centuray gone where women in the western countries fought to have the same rights as men i.e. the suffergets of britian who fought for the right to own property and to vote. And femisisn speaks of much 'freedoms' for women that are simply not permissable i.e. freedom for sexual expression?? I'll await a more knowledgable nomad to give u a more precises answer with regards to the religious oint of view, but essential form what i understand islam recognises the right of the female and womenand this is something we all know. And indeed correct me if am wrong islam, when it came to the arabs some 1400 yrs ago gave more rights to women then men. So no men are not threatend by feminism, certainly am not i find it amusing to here feminist speak lol women trying to be men (why???). Feminisim is something that is deff not compatibale with islam simply becaue it tries to empahisis equality between men and women in the social areana so i.e. women can be preists can be heads of state and so forth, this si something that is not acceptable from a religious point of view.

Bloody turks why did they have to have an inferiority complex?? they are 10 times better than england and yet the managed to cheat themselves out of @ least a draw. Far play to england though they deserved it in the end.

Interesting.................i wonder to whom this would benefit in the unfoldingpropaanda war that i.e. 'win the hearts and minds of the Iraq ppl'.

Is Israel More Secured Now that Iraqis are Dying? 4/3/2003 - Political - Article Ref: IV0304-1913 By: Ramzy Baroud Iviews* - Israel appears more at ease, now that American and British bombs are falling on Iraq, harvesting the lives of many innocents. Yet despite Israel's unambiguous role in all of this, few have connected the dots regarding the role played by Israel and its mouthpieces in the United States. Israel's task was to destroy one of the few remaining countries in the region that opposed the US proxy in the Middle East. Following Iraq, Israel was promised, that next would come Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance. Many conveniently blame the war on the 'neo-conservatives' in the American administration, some 'embedded' in the many think tanks that have tremendous influence on the decision-making process in Washington. But the relationship between the so-called neo-conservatives and the state of Israel is yet to be exposed. Those who recall events that preceded the war, know too well how the "doves" within the administration, at least for a short while, opposed the military option on Iraq vs. those who championed the 'total war' strategy starting in 1992 (not following September. 11, 2001 as many are lead to believe), as outlined in the 'Wolfowitz Doctrine.' Paul Wolfowitz, one of the most vibrant advocates of Israel's policy in the US government was then the undersecretary for policy in the Pentagon. In March 1992, Wolfowitz, who was delegated to draft the "Defense Planning Guidance", outlined his ambitions instead, where he proposed that nations should be 'discouraged' from "challenging our leadership". Wolfowitz was one of the first to propose the pre-emptive war, (used by Israel in its war against the Arabs in 1967) to allegedly "prevent the development of weapons of mass destruction". Wolfowitz, who seemed to get along very well with the right wing elements within Israeli governments, 'accidentally' neglected the fact that Israel's nuclear program was active as early as 1952, with the creation of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC). He worried little about Israel, but aimed at 'disarming' the sanctions devastated nation of Iraq. The Wolfowitz proposal, which eventually gained momentum and won over the support of the administrations' big names, shamefully manipulating the September 11 tragedy to score cheap victories for Israel to subdue its rivals in the Middle East. The neo-conservatives gained yet more ground when President George Bush appointed Elliot Abrams, described by a recent newsletter of the Washington-based Council for the National Interest on March 14, 2003 as "a convicted felon in the disgraceful Iran-Contra operation, outspoken mouthpiece for Israel and critic of the peace process." Oddly, the anti-peace advocate was made the President's new chief advisor in the Middle East. The pro-Israeli circle in the Administration, ferocious advocates of the pre-emptive war strategy and whose duel allegiances seem to disregard the interests of the American people, was almost complete. Abrams joined the ranks of pro-Israeli war hawks, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and most notably Donald Rumsfeld, whose infamous referral to the Palestinian occupied territories as "so-called occupied territories (being) a result of a war which (Israel) won", left many pondering whether the US was at all committed to peace and stability in the Middle East. Many people across the US must have doubted the alleged relationship between al-Qaeda and the September 11 terrorist attacks on one hand, and Iraq on the other. (Considering that even George Tenet of the CIA had bluntly told a Congress Committee that, evidence of such links proved unsubstantiated.) Why has the United States suddenly decided to jump into the swamp of redrawing the geo-political map of the Middle East, considering that neither its oil imports nor its growing multinational corporations' influence in the region is at risk (excluding the backlash inspired by the anti-American sentiment, itself inspired by the cruelty of the Israeli army in the occupied territories. It's no secret that Israel uses American weapons to kill Palestinians, money to build and expand its illegal settlements and political backing to thumb its nose at international law and the international community.) Zelman Shuval, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington shed some light on the answer in an article, published in the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Ahronot on January 16, 2003. Shuval, said that Israel should make 'behind the scenes' efforts to get the American administration to attack Iraq "sooner rather than later". Postponing, delaying or canceling the war, he asserted, would create "very negative consequences" for Israel. Of course, the United States' government has its own reasons to attack Iraq: global supremacy, strategic control, oil of course, the failure of the Afghanistan war to boost the sense of security among Americans, diverting the attention from the major financial scandals involving top government officials, diverting attention from the crumbling economy and soaring unemployment. But even with these reasons, Israel, its strong Washington lobby and major players within the administration, were always on top of things, pushing for a war that was vehemently rejected by a few countries shy of the whole world. Not only that Israel's role in this war has been overlooked, but also pro-Israeli pundits have done their best to lead the American people to look the other way from Israel's real political motives in the war. Jerry Falwell and his fanatic cronies on one hand, preached to millions about how Israel is "a key player in end times events," for, "according to scripture things are falling into place for Jesus' return É the great Tribulation, Armageddon and the millennial reign of Christ." In the meantime, pro-Israeli media collaborators thought of every wrong reason to justify the war, from liberating Iraq, to making the world a better place, to explaining how the war fits neatly into the "clash of civilizations" theory, a theory mainly aimed at engaging the world in a dishonest debate over cultural feuds, while the issue resides in business, power, control and politics. On the other hand, few dared to propose that Israel will not be able to carry out its illegal policies in the Middle East: land confiscation, unfair 'peace' proposition, ethnic cleansing, and coercing its Arab neighbors into accepting Israel's regional supremacy. (Who would dare say no to Israel once Iraq is occupied, and while the US military machine is present to crush any dissent? In fact, who would dare question the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands, in violation of international law, if the United States is itself occupying an Arab country, also in violation of international law?) It was no coincidence when Secretary of State, Collin Powell rushed to address lobbyists from the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, on March 30, less than two weeks after the launching of the Iraq War. Powell renewed the United States' commitment to Israel, condemned Palestinian bombings as a "cowardly acts", (no word on the murder of scores of Palestinians preceding the bombings), and assured Israel and its agents in the US of the sacred bond between his country and Israel. But most importantly, he promised a much safer Middle East for Israel after the toppling of the Iraqi government and President Saddam Hussein. Both Powell and the AIPAC members of course knew too well that Israel had, for many years, over two hundred nuclear warheads, including some thero-nuclear devices (aka, hydrogen bombs), a secret revealed by Mordechai Vanuni, a former Israeli nuclear technician, and also revealed by U-2 Spy Plane photographs. (Suddenly a fully developed arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction is no longer a concern) Placing most of the American army in desert battles to fight an illusionary enemy, while allowing Israel to run wild, threatening an entire region and defying international law in its oppression of the Palestinian people, will by no means bring 'peace and prosperity' to the Middle East. Moreover, hypocrisy, double-standards, and most certainly, unjust wars have never achieved, neither peace nor security. What they have done is evoked yet more anger, hatred, rebellion, and, dare I say, terrorism. Perhaps before fighting terrorism in the mountains of Tora Bora, we should examine where terrorism truly originates: our own unjust policies. Baroud is the editor of the PalestineChronicle.com and "Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion."

It is not a favpurite song just a phaat tune worthwhile checkin out, in fact there whole album is worthwhile lookin @ that is if ur a music lover anyway Artisit Dead Prez- Song "Selling D.O.P.E" (drugs oppress people. everyday)

Good point..........i mean in most cases the fathers (for what ever reasons) are not even in the same country as there spouse and children

lol

Henry will make the list?? i doubt it there are more deserving players Zidane Carlos Ruud.Van.Nis and Off course Totti Totti wins Zizou comparison Tuesday 1 April, 2003 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Francesco Totti is as good as Real Madrid ace Zinedine Zidane according to Roma boss Fabio Capello. The Giallorossi Coach was in the crowd for Italy’s 2-0 win against Finland on Saturday where the playmaker was the star of the show. "Technically speaking, Totti has reached the levels of Zidane," stated the tactician. "If Totti is physically fit then there is no doubt that he is one of the best five players in Europe." Totti was given a free role in a 4-2-3-1 system where the capital captain laid on both of Christian Vieri’s goals. "We used the same tactics when we won the Scudetto two years ago," continued the former Milan man. "We had Batistuta as a striker, with Delvecchio, Totti and Cafu all offering support. "This is an ideal system to get the very best from Totti. In many ways he plays like Raul does for Real Madrid."

Me to north, i cannot watch TV anymore lest i catch the propaganda and the boastfull killers

wow that was a great powerful piece

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Exporting Jenin to Nigel Parry, Electronic Iraq 31 March 2003 Nigel Parry. (Suzanne Klotz) On 29 March 2003, Justin Huggler, writing in the British Independent newspaper, reported that the US was "studying fighting in the West Bank city of Jenin last April" for clues on how to manage urban combat in the cities of Iraq. According to the article, Israeli professor Martin van Creveld, who teaches military history and strategy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told reporters that he lectured US Marines in Camp Lejeune in North Carolina in 2002. Questioned about Israeli tactics in Jenin by the Marines, van Creveld "told them the giant D9 bulldozers, manufactured for civilian use in the US but fitted with armour-plating in Israel, were among the most useful weapons." The article additionally noted that "the American military bought nine of the converted bulldozers used in the Jenin demolitions from Israel." ("Israelis trained US troops in Jenin-style urban warfare", by Justin Huggler in Amman, The Independent, 29 March 2003.) Israeli general Shaul Mofaz, now Israel's defence minister, admitted to the media that, when preparing for Jenin, Israel had "analyze[d] and internalize[d] the lessons of earlier battles -- even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto." (Ha'aretz, 25 January 2002). In the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Nazi army set fire to residents' homes to convince resistance fighters to surrender. In Jenin refugee camp, this lesson of Warsaw was adapted by targeting residents' homes with days of sustained missile fire from Israeli combat helicopters and by systematic bulldozing. Israeli troops used the Caterpillar D9 bulldozers in Jenin to clear wide passages through homes to enable tanks and armored personnel carriers to get into the camp. The bulldozers were also used to raze a large area in the center of the camp and were directly responsible for civilian deaths in cases where homes were bulldozed on top of their occupants. A May 2002 report from Human Rights Watch described the extent of the bulldozer damage in the center of the camp and detailed a case in which a bulldozer was used to kill a resident: "At least 140 buildings -- most of them multi-family dwellings -- were completely destroyed in the camp, and severe damage caused to more than 200 others has rendered them uninhabitable or unsafe. An estimated 4,000 people, more than a quarter of the population of the camp, were rendered homeless because of this destruction. Serious damage was also done to the water, sewage and electrical infrastructure of the camp. [...] The harm from this destruction was aggravated by the inadequate warning given to civilian residents. Although warnings were issued on multiple occasions by the IDF, many civilians only learned of the risk as bulldozers began to crush their houses. Jamal Fayid, a thirty-seven-year-old paralyzed man, was killed when the IDF bulldozed his home on top of him, refusing to allow his relatives the time to remove him from the home. [...] This case requires investigation as a possible war crime." ("Jenin: IDF Military Operations", Human Rights Watch, May 2002). Israel subsequently devoted massive resources towards politically derailing a United Nations investigation into the events in Jenin, and launched a massive public relations campaign to turn the debate about "what happened in Jenin?" into a semantic tussle about whether or not there was a "massacre". The utter devastation in the camp, the 50 percent civilian casualty rate, and a disturbing account by one of the Israeli bulldozer drivers in Jenin rendered this point redundant for people of conscience. The effect of Israel's massive campaign of distraction and, in particular, how passively the media accepted Israel's spin was totally out of sync with how the same media handles the killings of Israeli civilians. In the immediate aftermath of one 2002 bus bombing, CNN's graphics production department was quick to frame the live reporting as a "Rush Hour Massacre". The "M word" is used often in relation to the killings of Israelis on CNN, but never when the victims are Palestinians. CNN's subsequent investigative report into what happened in Jenin, by Sheila MacVicar, was pedantically framed by anchors to the point of sabotage: "MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: A compelling story now in two parts from our Sheila MacVicar. We're about to show you the beginning of what -- of that report on what happened in Jenin in the month during which so much of that place was reduced to rubble. But we want to make one point first. To put it bluntly, we have no way of ascertaining, any more than Sheila MacVicar herself had any way of ascertaining, whether or not the people she -- who she talked to were telling the truth absent independent verification, and that has been impossible to come by. The statements you're going to hear ought to be taken as charges, allegations awaiting proof, if there ever can be proof. We can't keep interrupting to remind you of that, but just keep it in mind. That said, here is Sheila MacVicar on what happened in Jenin." If it were not enough to have the facts of Jenin briefly raked through with tortured understatement and only a couple of moments of clarity in MacVicar's report, on every subsequent broadcast CNN's viewers were treated to similar "reminders" by anchors that, in fact, there are no such things as "facts". Needless to say, CNN exhibits no such care when Israeli claims about Palestinians are presented, regularly defaulting to Israeli ways of perceiving the conflict -- illegal settlements are termed "Jewish neighbourhoods" and Israel's brutal military occupation is whitewashed as "what Palestinians see as military occupation." As a result of all this distraction, misrepresentation, and political maneuvering by Israel, the world never really was allowed to discover and reflect on the gravity of what actually happened in Jenin, and Palestinians were left to add one more event to their historical time line to be remembered primarily as an event which they exaggerated, rather than one Israel worked hard to encourage us to bury like the bodies bulldozed into the rubble of the camp. It is not Israel's barring of journalists, international aid workers, or medical personnel from Jenin between 3-17 April 2002 that we remember with a grimace, but a single word which Saeb Erekat allegedly said in one of several CNN interviews he gave during the terrifying information blackout. A single Palestinian's articulation of the collective fears of a people whose history has been peppered with uninvestigated massacres is more of a stumbling block for our consciences than our lack of forthright investigation into the facts of the matter. That the US has apparently not only "learned" from what human rights groups characterised at the time as "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" but has actually purchased from the very same perpetrators the very same tools used to commit these acts for reuse in Iraq, communicates an undeniable message to the Arab world of American support for Israel so blind and insensitive to both Palestinians and Iraqis that it is terrifying. Living in America these days, it is shocking to see how little the current US administration cares about how it is perceived around the world. President George W. Bush and his far right advisors who steer American foreign policy are apparently leaving no stone unturned to squander what is left of America's good name on unpopular causes justified by increasingly incredible exaggerations of "threat". After the 11 September 2001 attack against the citizens of the world in New York City, the international community -- bar a handful of fringe groups -- were united around the United States' stated declaration to take decisive action against international terrorism. At this point, I am reminded of the tens and tens of thousands of Palestinians who came out on to the streets of Palestinian towns to celebrate the Oslo redeployments. Several months later, when it became clear that the Israelis had only taken a step back out of the towns to maintain a caging perimeter, and that Israel's land confiscation and home demolition had continued unabated, attitudes changed dramatically. Even the so called 'rejectionist' Palestinian groups had ceased their violence until it became clear that Israel was using the peace process as a cover for expanding its military occupation and doubling the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. Israel's transparent lack of dedication to the peace process terminally undermined the initially very visible and undeniable Palestinian commitment to it. The inevitable consequence to Israel's blatant misuse of the peace process as a fig leaf for the most extensive land grab for years was the Intifada, fueled from day one by Israel's typical heavy handed use of live ammunition in response to stone-throwing demonstrations. America faces a similar problem of terminal credibility loss in the gulf between its words and deeds. One and a half years into America's "war against terror", Afghanistan has buried a comparable number of civilians killed by US bombing to those America buried after the World Trade Center attacks. To say that the new Afghan regime is "beset by serious problems" is somewhat reminiscent of CNN's treatment of Jenin. Last weekend saw another two American soldiers killed -- not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. With all the current focus on Iraq, it's hard to remember that our last regime change isn't going that well. Meanwhile, the primary reasons the US offers for extending its war to Iraq -- the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime to regional stability and the liberation of the Iraqi people -- are utterly at odds with the way that the US has approached this war, by defying the very democratic mechanism of international order that was established with fear and trembling in the wake of the last world war. In the name of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the US has compromised its own theoretical commitment to media freedom by co-opting journalists into combat units where they have no choice but to identify with the soldiers on whom their safety depends, by pressuring foreign media organisations to suppress all reports of failure, and by bombing Iraqi state television and the telecommunications infrastructure, the latter of which is aimed to quash the tiny percentage of non-commercial media reporting originating from Baghdad via the Internet. Blatantly unrepresentative images of a couple Iraqis helping a US Marine to tear down a portrait of Saddam Hussein fool no one. While many Iraqis indeed want to see the back of Saddam Hussein tyrannical regime, they are simultaneously aware that their self appointed "liberators" are the very same people responsible for a decade of genocide by sanctions that has killed somewhere in the region of one-and-a-half million Iraqis, a greater pile of bodies than that which lies at the feet of Saddam Hussein. And now we find that the US intends to use the very tactics and tools that shocked the world in Jenin on the Iraqis it claims it wants to "liberate". These are bitter days indeed. Please let no one be surprised if the expected street parties for our troops don't materialise quite as expected. Especially not when we're talking about exporting Jenin to Iraq. Nigel Parry is one of the founders of Electronic Iraq and the Electronic Intifada. Page last updated: 31 March 2003, 14:03 CST This page is part of Electronic Iraq/electronicIraq.net, a joint project from Voices in the Wilderness and The Electronic Intifada. Views expressed on this page may or may not be representative of Electronic Iraq or its founders. All material on this website is copyright ©2003 of the author or original source. See our Note for Webmasters for more information about our dissemination-friendly linking, syndication, and reprint policies. Contact Us.

SHOULD I LET THE WIND TELL HER HOW I FEEL ABOUT HER? Na Bruv dont let one off infornt of her thats the last thing u want to do

WOW so its for real?? Then all there is left to say is Congratulations you ameenah and congratulations MMA

first target of the coalition forces has been electircity and water of the town. saddam hussein has not cut these off. these have been targeted and bombed by the coalition forsces to force the civilian population into surrender and they said" we will take away ur electericity and water , we will shock and awe you through the worst kind of bombing modern nations have ever seen, but if u come to us with white flags and cheers, we will give u aid, water,food. if u allow us to control u and run ur lives and decide on your govermnent, we ill conctrut ur cities and give u all the food u can eat" is the message of the propaganda uleashed by the invading forces on a sovereign nation . i just highlighted the above extarct from ur posting as it particularly relevant to what has been said so many times before. Clearly the UN had its part to play in this current war, and i for one am glad to see its demise, coz lets face it's not that it just recently became a 'talking shop' it was always nothing but a buttering house for western countries who had imperial desires. The fact remains that the us and GB are aggressors in iraq, invaders and not liberators(this is accepted universally) by every man woman and his/her DONKEY just look @ the worldwide protests. They have from the outset of the campaign edited news reels i.e. (bassra troops surrender and many more)to give false impressions of the reality of the events that where unfolding within iraq. What this campaign, and the events of september the 11 has done is open my, and presumable many more nomads eyes, completely to the realities of the current world structure. It is Capitalist, it is Void, lol it isnt even democratic as the current status qou would have u belive: no rather it is driven by un-elected multi-nationals and the desire for access to new markets, it is illegal, uni-lateral, Anti-Islam (in what ever shape it'self deems islam to be i.e. islamisits, extremisits, modernist etc etc)and thus is something that is in need of urgent change. I can only pray that the victory that allah has promised to us muslims draws near everyday with the realisation by us that we need to change those leaders that facilitate such aggressors. I pray that a time will come when they will be those amongst us who will be our future leaders, who will be unlike these current pityless, amoral, incompetent, incumbunts that are currently presiding over the all the middleastern and other muslim countries.

lol i think someone needs to lay off the chaad

Salam calayakum nomads. am glad so many nomads appreciated the inherent morale of the poem, i no i got the same feeling the first time i read such piognent words. And no benevolent saxiib i didnt right the poem i recieved it from the belwo email list Fear_Allaah-owner@yahoogroups.com

lol 10/10 for honesty bruv

An Interesting anaylsis S_p

k let me see if i'h got this correct. WICKED = SERIA A aiight

I would especially like to here the thoughts of those more knowledgavle nomads on if such actions are indeed legitmate under islam or if this would be still considered as taking ur on life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Suicide bombers 'arrive in Iraq' Arab volunteers: Already in Baghdad A militant Palestinian group has declared that its first wave of volunteer suicide bombers has arrived in Iraq. Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad said in a statement that it "brings to our people and nation the good news of the arrival of its first martyrdom (attackers) to the heart of Baghdad." The group's mission is "to fulfil the holy duty of defending Arab and Muslim land," by attacking coalition troops, the statement said. Iraq has declared that more than 4,000 foreign Arab volunteers have come forward to fight and were ready to die if necessary. New strategy Army spokesman General Hazem al-Rawi told a news conference in Baghdad suicide missions against US and British soldiers would be stepped up as the war continues. His comments come a day after a group of US soldiers in the central city of Najaf were killed in a suicide car bombing. We are a believing people, a fighting people, Jihad is a must, a duty ordained by God, Iraqi army spokesman General Hazim al-Rawi The attacker - dressed in civilian clothes - drove a taxi to a checkpoint near the central city of Najaf and, as the soldiers approached it, detonated it. The Iraqi spokesman also challenged the US account of casualties in the incident. "Eleven, not four Americans were killed," he said, and dozens injured in what he described as the first on the glorious path of Jihad (holy war) against the invaders," Tactical adjustments Earlier, Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan said such attacks would become "routine military policy". "We will use any means to kill our enemy in our land and we will follow the enemy into its land," he said. The BBC's Gavin Hewitt, who is with US forces in Iraq, says it is a worrying development for the troops, who are already having to contend with sniping and other attacks. Najaf has been the scene of intense fighting The US army's Major-General Stanley McChrystal said the attack would not affect the overall operation or rules of engagement though some changes might be made. "Clearly when you see a tactic like this, it requires strict adherence or adjustments to your tactics, techniques and procedures to ensure that places like checkpoints are not vulnerable," he said. Prior to the military campaign, there were warnings of possible suicide attacks. In mid-March, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri told an Arabic television station that tens of thousands of Iraqi men and women were ready to be martyrs for any war against the US enemies.

Thx Ramp its looks pretty cool am have to check it out in detail later on peace out

Wlcm yo th site Interest observations M_S lol, may i asl where these personal ideosincracies that u have lately discovered about urself

US Admits Claim was False The US military has admitted that claims regarding the capture of 8,000 soldiers were false. The soldiers "captured" by the US military are currently battling against British forces near Basra. The Pentagon blames Saddam's Fedayeen troops for the confusion. The official statement now is that only a "couple of commanders" have been captured. One of these "commanders" has turned out to be a junior official who lied about his rank. Source: www.ananova.com Saddam was once a "Good American" Despite being a current member of the so-called "Axis of Evil," there was a time when Saddam Hussein was considered a "Good American." So good, in fact, that in 1980 he was presented with the Key to the City of Detroit. "Times were different back then. [saddam] was the friend of the United States at the time, a puppet who relied on US backing to counter the threat of Iran" said Yasso, pastor of Detroit's Sacred Heart Parish, who received approx $500,000 from Saddam. Yasso was also invited by Saddam to visit Iraq. While there, Saddam "was a good American at the time and treated us royally." But Yasso is not surprised that Saddam has become an enemy, saying "He was corrupted by power and money." Source: www.canada.com Key Rumsfeld Advisor Perle Resigns Richard Perle has chosen to resign his post as chair of the Defense Policy Board. Perle is a key advisor to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Perle said he did not want controversies over him to interfere with the war effort. Perle was trying to get the government to approve a deal between a bankrupt firm called Global Crossing LTD and two Asian firms. He would have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. The post he had forbids making private gain off the government. Perle says that this deal had nothing to do with advising on policy matters for the Pentagon and he said he would not collect money from such deals. Under Reagan Perle was known as "the Prince of Darkness" because he opposed arms control agreements. Source: www.sfgate.com

The United States is not the monolith many Arabs presume it to be. It is more accurate, writes Edward Said, to apprehend America as embroiled in a serious clash of identities whose counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout the rest of the world -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A small item in the press a few days ago reported that Prince Ibn Al-Walid of Saudi Arabia had donated 10 million dollars to the American University in Cairo to establish a department or centre of American Studies there. It should be recalled that the young billionaire had contributed an unsolicited 10 million dollars to New York City shortly after the 11 September bombings, with an accompanying letter that, aside from describing the handsome sum as a tribute to New York, also suggested that the United States might reconsider its policy towards the Middle East. Obviously he had total and unquestioning American support for Israel in mind, but his politely stated proposition seemed also to cover the general American policy of denigrating, or at least showing disrespect, for Islam. In a fit of petulant rage, the then Mayor of New York (which also has the largest Jewish population of any city in the world), Rudolph Guiliani, returned the check to Al-Walid, rather unceremoniously and with an extreme and I would say racist contempt that was meant to be insulting as well as gloating. On behalf of a certain image of New York, he personally was upholding the city's demonstrated bravery and its principled resistance to outside interference. And of course pleasing, rather than trying to educate, a purportedly unified Jewish constituency. Guiliani's churlish behaviour was of a piece with his refusal several years before (in 1995, well after the Oslo signings) to admit Yasser Arafat to the Philharmonic Hall for a concert to which everyone at the UN had been invited. Typical of the cheap theatrics of the below average American big city politician, what New York's mayor did in response to the young Saudi Arabian's gift was completely predictable. Even though the money was intended, and greatly needed, for humanitarian use in a city wounded by a terrible atrocity, the American political system and its main actors put Israel ahead of everything, whether or not Israel's amply endowed and highly mobilised lobbyists would have done the same thing. In any case, no one knows what would have occurred if Guiliani didn't return the money; but as things turned out he had nicely preempted even the well- oiled pro-Israeli lobbying apparatus. As the celebrated novelist and essayist Joan Didion wrote in a recent New York Review of Books article, it has become a staple of US policy first articulated by FD Roosevelt that America has tried against all logic to maintain a hopelessly contradictory support for the Saudi monarchy on the one hand and, on the other, with the state of Israel, so much so, she adds, that "we have become unable to discuss anything that might be seen as touching on our relationship with the current government of Israel" (p56, Jan 16, 03). The two stories about Prince Al-Walid dovetail nicely with each other, and show a continuity that has been quite rare so far as Arab views of America have been concerned. For at least three generations, Arab leaders, politicians, and their more often than not American-trained advisers have been formulating policies for their countries whose basis is an almost completely fictitious and quite fanciful idea of what America is. Far from coherent, this idea is at bottom all about how 'the Americans' really run everything, even though in its details the notion encompasses a wide, not to say jumbled, range of opinions, from on the one hand seeing America as a conspiracy of Jews, to theories on the other stipulating that America is either a bottomless well of benign good feeling and help for the downtrodden, or that it is ruled from A to Z by an unchallenged white man sitting like an Olympian figure in the White House. I recall many times during the 20 years that I knew Yasser Arafat well, trying to explain to him that this was a complex society with all sorts of currents, interests, pressures, and histories in conflict within it and that far from being ruled the way Syria was, for instance, a different model of power and authority ought to be studied. I enlisted my late friend, the scholar and political activist, Eqbal Ahmed, who had an expert knowledge of American society but was also perhaps the finest theorist and historian of anti-colonial national liberation movements in the world, to talk to Arafat and bring along other experts so that a sharper, more nuanced model might develop for use by the Palestinians during their preliminary contacts with the US government in the late 1980s -- but all to no avail. Ahmed had carefully studied the Algerian FLN's relationship with France during the war of 1954-62 as well as the North Vietnamese while they were negotiating with Kissinger during the 1970s. The contrast between a scrupulous, detailed knowledge of the metropolitan society with which these insurgents had been in conflict and the Palestinians' almost caricatural knowledge of America (based mainly on hearsay and cursory readings in Time magazine) was stark. Arafat's single-minded obsession was to make his way personally into the White House and talk to that whitest of white men Bill Clinton: in his view that would be the equivalent perhaps of getting things done with Mubarak of Egypt or Hafez Al-Assad of Syria. If in the meantime Clinton revealed himself to be the master- creature of American politics, completely overwhelming and confusing the Palestinians with his charm and his manipulation of the system, so much the worse for Arafat and his men. Their simplified view of America was monumentally unchanged, as it still is today. As for resistance or knowing how to play the game of politics in a world with only one, all- conquering super-power in it, matters remain as they have for over half a century. Most people throw up their hands in despair like disappointed lovers: America is hopeless, and I don't ever want to go back there, they often say, though one also notices that green, permanent residence cards are much in demand, as are university admissions for the children. Click to view caption EMPIRE CONSTRUCTED: The American occupation of the Philippines -- in the context of the 1898 Spanish-American War -- put the US on the road to empire EMPIRE RESISTED: American "Women's Strike for Peace" storming the Pentagon in a 1967 protest against the war in Vietnam -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The other, more hopeful side of the story concerns what seems to have been Prince Al-Walid's later change of direction, about which I can only surmise. But I do know that apart from a few courses and seminars on American literature and politics scattered throughout the universities of the Arab world, there has never been anything like an academic centre for the systematic and scientific analysis of America, its people, society, and history, at all. Not even in American institutions like the American Universities of Cairo and Beirut. This lack may also be true throughout the Third World, and maybe even in some European countries. The point I am making is that to live in a world that is held in the grip of an extraordinarily unbound great power there is a vital need for knowing as much about its swirling dynamics as is humanly possible. And that, I believe, also includes commanding an excellent working command of the language, something few Arab leaders (as a case in point) possess. Yes, America is the country of McDonald's, Hollywood, blue jeans, Coca-Cola and CNN, all of them products exported and available everywhere by virtue of globalisation, multinational corporations, and what seems to be the world's appetite for articles of easy, convenient consumption. But we must also be conscious of from what source these come and in what ways the cultural and social processes from which they ultimately derive can be interpreted, especially since the danger of thinking about America too simply or reductively and statically is so obvious. Even as I write these lines much of the world is being bludgeoned into a restive submission by (or, as are the cases of Italy and Spain, an utterly opportunistic alliance with) America as it readies itself for a deeply unpopular war against Iraq. But for the ongoing global demonstrations and protests that have erupted entirely at the popular level, the war would simply be a brazen act of unopposed cynical domination. Yet contested as it is by so many Americans as well as Europeans, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans who have taken to the streets and to their local newspapers at least suggests that at last there is an awakening to the fact that the United States, or rather the small handful of Judeo-Christian white men who currently rule its government, is bent on world hegemony. What to do then? In what follows I shall offer a rapid sketch of the extraordinary panorama presented by today's America, as seen by someone who is American and has lived comfortably in it for years and years, but who by virtue of his Palestinian origins, still retains his perspective as a comparative outsider, but a kind of insider also. My interest is simply to suggest ways of understanding, intervening in, and if the word isn't too inappropriate, resisting a country that is far from the monolith it is usually taken to be, specially in the Arab and Muslim worlds. What is there to be seen? The difference between America and the classic empires of the past is that, even though each empire asserted its utter originality and its determination not to repeat the overreaching ambitions of imperial predecessors, this one does so with an astonishing affirmation of its nearly sancrosanct altruism and well-meaning innocence. For this alarming delusion there is, even more alarmingly, a new squadron of formerly Left or liberal intellectuals alike who had historically opposed American wars abroad but who are now prepared to make the case for virtuous empire (the figure of the lonely sentry has been used) using a variety of styles, from tub-thumping patriotism to sly cynicism. The events of 11 September play a role in this volte face, but what is surprising is that the Twin Towers-Pentagon bombings, horrible though they were, retreated as if they came from nowhere, rather than in fact from a world across the seas driven crazy by American intervention and ubiquitous American presence. This is of course not to condone Islamic terrorism, which is a hateful thing in every way. But it is to remark that in all the pious analyses of America's responses to Afghanistan and now Iraq, history and proportionality have simply dropped out of the picture entirely. What the liberal hawks specially don't refer to, however, is the Christian Right (so similar to Islamic extremism in fervor and righteousness) and its massive, indeed decisive presence in America today. The qualities of that vision derive from mostly Old Testament sources, very much of a piece with those of Israel, its close partner and analogue. A peculiar alliance between Israel's influential neoconservative American supporters and the Christian extremists is that the latter support Zionism as a way of bringing all the Jews to the Hold y Land to prepare the way for the Messiah's Second Coming; at which point Jews will either have to convert to Christianity or be annihilated. The bloody and rabidly anti-Semitic teleologies are rarely referred to, certainly not by the pro-Israeli Jewish phalanx. America is the world's most avowedly religious country. References to God permeate the national life, from coins to buildings to common forms of speech: in God we trust, God's country, God bless America, and on and on. George Bush's power base is made up of the 60-70 million fundamentalist Christians who, like him, believe they have seen Jesus and are here to do God's work in God's country. Some sociologists and journalists (including Francis Fukuyuma and David Brooks) have argued that contemporary American religion is the result of a desire for community and a long-gone sense of stability, given the fact that approximately 20 per cent of the population is moving from home to home all the time. But the evidence for that desire is true only up to a point: what matters more is religion by prophetic illumination, unshakeable conviction in a sometimes apocalyptic sense of mission, and a heedless disregard of small-scale facts and complications. The enormous geographical distance of the country from the turbulent world is another factor, as is the fact that Canada and Mexico are continental neighbours with little capability of tempering American enthusiasm. All of those things converge around an idea of American rightness, goodness, freedom, economic promise, social advancement that is so ideologically woven into the fabric of daily life that it doesn't even appear to be ideological, but rather a fact of nature. America=good=total loyalty and love. Similarly there is an unconditional reverence for the Founding Fathers, and for the Constitution, an amazing document, it is true, but a human one nevertheless. Early America is the anchor of American authenticity. In no country that I know does a waving flag play so central an iconographical role. You see it everywhere, on taxicabs, on men's jacket lapels, on the front windows and roofs of houses everywhere. It is the main embodiment of the national image, signifying heroic endurance and a beleaguered sense of fighting of unworthy enemies. Patriotism is still the prime American virtue, tied up as it is with religion, belonging, and doing the right thing not just at home but all over the world. Patriotism is also represented in retail consumer spending, as when Americans were enjoined after the events of 9/11 to do a lot of shopping in defiance of evil terrorists. Bush and employees of his like Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice and Ashcroft have tapped into all of that to mobilise the military for war 7000 miles away in order 'to get' Saddam, as he is referred to universally. Underlying all this is the machinery of capitalism, now undergoing radical and, I think, destabilising change. The economist Julie Schor has shown that Americans now work far more hours than they did three decades ago, and are making relatively less money for their efforts. But still there is no serious, systematic political challenge to the dogmas of what are referred to as the opportunities of a free market. It's as if no one cares whether the corporate structure in alliance with the federal government, which still hasn't been able to provide most Americans with decent universal health coverage and a sound education, has to be changed. News of the stock market is more important than re-examining the system. This is a crude summary of the American consensus, which in fact politicians exploit and try endlessly to simplify into slogans and sound bites. But what one discovers about this amazingly complex society is how many counter- currents and alternatives run across and around this consensus all the time. The growing resistance to war that the president has been essentially minimising and pretending to ignore, derives from the other less formal America that the mainstream media (newspapers of record such as The New York Times, the main networks, the publishing and magazine industries in large measure) always tries to paper over and keep down. Never has there been so unashamed, if not scandalous, complicity between TV news and the government's rush to war: even the average newsreader that turns up on CNN or one of the major networks talks excitedly about Saddam's evils and how 'we' have to stop him before it's too late. And if that is not bad enough, the airwaves are filled with ex-military men, terrorism experts, and Middle East policy analysts who know none of the relevant languages, may never have seen any part of the Middle East, and are too poorly educated to be expert at anything, all of them arguing in a memorised jargon about the need for 'us' to do something about Iraq, while preparing our windows and cars for an impending poison gas attack. Because it is a managed and constructed thing the consensus operates in a sort of timeless present. History is anathema to it, and in accepted public discourse even the word 'history' is a synonym for nothingness or non-entity, as in the scornful, typically dismissive American phrase, 'you're history.' Otherwise history is what as Americans we are supposed to believe about America (not about the rest of the world, which is 'old' and generally left behind, hence irrelevant) uncritically, loyally, unhistorically. There is an amazing polarity at work here. In the popular mind America is supposed to stand above or beyond history. On the other hand, there is an all-consuming general interest that one encounters across the country in the history of everything, from small regional topics, to the vaster reaches of world empires. Many cults develop out of both these carefully balanced opposites, which encompass the road from xenophobic patriotism to other-worldly spiritualism and reincarnation. One rather more worldly example of the struggle about history is worth recalling here. A decade ago a great intellectual battle was waged in the public sphere over what kind of history should be taught in schools. What was clear about the va-et-vient that occurred over many weeks was that the promoters of the idea of American history as a heroically unified national narrative with entirely positive resonances for young minds, thought of history as essential not only for the truth, but for the ideological propriety of representations that would mould students into essentially docile citizens, ready to accept a set of basic themes as the constants in America's relationships with itself and the rest of the world. Purged from this essentialist view were to be the elements of what was called postmodernism and divisive history (that of minorities, women, slavery, etc) but the result, interestingly enough, was a failure so far as the imposition of such risible standards was concerned. As Linda Symcox sums it up, "Certainly one would argue, as I do, that...[the neoconservative] approach to cultural literacy is a thinly disguised attempt to inculcate students with a relatively conflict-free, consensual view of history. But the project ended up moving in a different direction altogether. In the hands of social and world historians, who actually wrote the Standards with the K-12 teachers, the Standards became a vehicle for the pluralistic vision the government was trying to combat. In the end, consensus history, or cultural reproduction... was challenged by those historians who felt that social justice and the redistribution of power demanded a more complex telling of the past." In the public sphere over which in so many ways the mass mainstream media preside there are thus a series of what one might call narrathemes that structure, package and control discussion, despite the appearance of variety and diversity. I shall discuss only a small number of them that strike me as acutely pertinent at this time. One of course is that there is a collective 'we', a national identity represented without apparent demurral by our president, our secretary of state at the UN, our armed forces in the desert, and our interests, which are routinely seen as self-defensive, without ulterior motive, and in an overall way, innocent in the way that a traditional woman is supposed to be innocent, pure, free of sin, etc. Another narratheme is the irrelevance of history, and the inadmissibility of illegitimate 'linkage', for example, the facts that the US once had armed and encouraged Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, or that Vietnam (when it is mentioned at all) and its particular form of devastation was 'bad' for the country or, as Jimmy Carter once put it memorably, that it was a form of "mutual" self-destruction. Or even more staggering, the ongoing and even institutional irrelevance of two immensely important and constitutively American experiences, the slavery of the African-American people and the dispossession and quasi-extermination of the native American population. These have yet to be figured into the national consensus in any serious way. (Whereas there is a major Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, no such memorial exists either for African-Americans or native Americans, anywhere in the country). A third is the unexamined conviction that opposition to our policies is 'anti-Americanism' which is based on jealousy about 'our' democracy, freedom, wealth and greatness or, as the current obsession with French resistance to an American war against Iraq has it, plain and ordinary foreign nastiness. In this context Europeans are constantly reminded of how America saved them twice in the past century, with the subsidiary implication that most Europeans simply sat back watching while American troops did all the real fighting. And when it comes to places where the US has been extraordinarily entangled for at least 50 years like the Middle East or Latin America, the narratheme of America as the honest broker, the impartial adjudicator, the entirely well-intentioned international force for good, has no serious competitor to it; what we have therefore is a strand of thought that has little place in it for issues relating to power, or financial gain, or resource grabbing, or ethnic lobbying, or forcible and/or surreptitious regime change (as in Iran and Chile, for instance), and as a result remains quite undisturbed except for occasional efforts to recall them. The closest one gets to that kind of realism is in the abhorrently euphemistic idiom of the thinktanks and the government, idioms that discuss soft power and projection and American vision. Still less represented (or even alluded to) are policies of extraordinary cruelty or invidiousness for which America is directly responsible like support for the Sharonian campaign against Palestinian civilian life, or the terrible civilian casualties incurred by Iraqi sanctions, or the support given the Turkish and Columbian regimes for horrendously inhuman punishments against ordinary citizens. These are considered out of bounds during serious discussions of 'policy'. Finally, the narratheme of unchallenged moral wisdom as represented in figures with official authority (eg Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, plus every present official of the current administration) is reproduced over and over without very much of a twinge of doubt. The fact, for instance, that two Nixon-era convicted felons (Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter) have recently been endowed with significant government positions attracts little comment, much less objection. This sort of blind appreciation of authority past or present, pure or sullied, occurs in many different forms, all the way from the respectful, even abject forms of address used by commentators and pundits, to a total unwillingness to see anything in the authority figure except his or her polished appearance (for instance, the de rigueur dark suit, white shirt, and red tie), unscarred by anything in the past record that might be incriminating to a serious degree. Buttressing that is, I believe, the American belief in pragmatism as a philosophic system of dealing with reality that is anti-metaphysical, anti- historical and, curiously, even anti-philosophical. Postmodern anti-nominalism of the kind that reduces everything to sentence structure and linguistic context is allied with this, and is a very influential style of thought existing alongside analytic philosophy in the American university. In my own university, figures such as Hegel and Heidegger, for example, are taught in literature or art history departments, rarely in philosophy. It is this amazingly persistent set of master stories that the newly organised and mobilised American information effort (especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds) is designed by hook or crook to spread. What gets deliberately obscured in the process are the stunningly obstinate dissenting traditions -- America's unofficial counter-memory that stem in large part from the fact that this is an immigrant society -- that flourish alongside, or at the interior of this handful of narrathemes. Few commentators abroad take much notice of this forest of dissent, alas. These clumps of both the progressive or regressive kind provide and to a trained observer make visible linkages between the master narrathemes that are normally not in evidence. If one were to examine the components of the impressively strong resistance to the proposed Bush war against Iraq, for example, a very different, highly mobile picture of America emerges, one that is much more amenable to foreign cooperation, dialogue and significant action. I shall leave aside the considerable number of people who oppose the war on grounds having to do with its human cost in blood and treasure as well as its disastrous effect on an already badly disturbed economy. I shall also not discuss the great swirl of Right-wing opinion that sees America as traduced by treacherous foreigners, the United Nations, and godless communists. In addition, the libertarian and isolationist constituency, which is a strange combination of Left and Right, needs no further comment here. I would also include among these categories that must be left unexamined here a very large and idealistically inspired university student population that is deeply suspicious of American foreign policy in almost all of its forms, especially economic globalisation: this is a principled and sometimes quasi-anarchical group that has kept American university and college campuses alive to such issues in the past as the war in Vietnam, South African apartheid, and civil rights at home. This leaves several important and in many ways formidable constituencies of experience and conscience for me to survey very rapidly here. These generally pertain, in European and Afro-Asian terms, to the Left, given that anything like an organised parliamentary Left-wing or socialist movement has never really existed for any length of time in post-World War Two America, so powerful is the grip of the two-party apparatus. As for the Democratic Party today, it is in a shambles from which it will not soon recover. One would have to include for a start the positively disaffected and still fairly radical wing of the African-American community, that is, those urban groups who agitate against police brutality, job discrimination, housing and educational neglect, and are led or represented by iconic or charismatic figures such as Rev Al Sharpton, Cornel West, Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson (faded as a leader though he is) and several others who see themselves as continuing in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. Associated with this movement are numerous other activist ethnic collectivities, including Latinos, Native Americans, and Muslims, each of which of course has devoted considerable energy to trying to slip into the mainstream, in pursuit of important political assignments in local and national governments, appearance on prestigious television talk shows, and membership on governing boards of foundations, colleges, and corporations. But in the main, however, most of those groups are still more activated by a sense of injustice and discrimination than they are by ambition, and therefore aren't ready to enlist completely in the American (mostly white and middle-class) dream. The interesting thing about someone like Sharpton, for example, or say Ralph Nader and his loyal supporters in the protesting but still struggling Green Party, is that though they may have visibility and a certain degree of acceptability they remain outsiders, basically uncoopted, too intransigent, and not sufficiently interested in the routine rewards that the society offers. One huge wing of the women's movement, active on behalf of abortion rights, abuse and harassment issues, professional equality is also a major asset to the dissenting current in American society. Similarly, sectors of the normally sedate, interest- and advancement-oriented professional groups (physicians, lawyers, scientists, academics in particular, as well as a number of labor unions, and a sector of the environmental movement) feed into the dynamic of counter- currents I am listing here, even though of course as corporate bodies they retain a major interest in the orderly functioning of society and the agendas that derive from them. Then too the organised churches themselves can never be discounted as seedbeds of change and dissent. Their membership is to be clearly distinguished from the fundamentalist and televangelist movements I mentioned above. Catholic Bishops, for example, the laity and clergy of the Episcopal Church, in addition to the Quakers and the Presbyterian synod -- despite the various travails that include sexual scandals in the first and depleted memberships in most of the others -- have been surprisingly liberal on war and peace questions, and quite willing to speak out against international human rights abuses, the hyper-inflated military budgets, and neo-liberal economic policies that have mutilated the public sphere since the early 1980s. Historically there was always a segment of the organised Jewish community involved in progressive minority rights causes domestically and abroad, but since the Reagan period the ascendancy of the neo-conservative movement, the alliance between Israel and the religious Right in this country, and feverish Zionist- organised activity equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and even fear of a new American Auschwitz, have reduced the positive agency of that force quite considerably. Finally, a large number of groups and individuals sought out for rallies, protest marches, and peaceful demonstrations has stood out of the mind-deadening patriotism in the post-9/11 period. These have clustered around civil liberties (including free speech and constitutional guarantees) that have been threatened by the Terrorist and Patriot Acts. Agitation against capital punishment, occasional protests at the abuses represented by the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay, a general distrust of civilian authorities in the military, as well as an increasing discomfort at the increasingly privatised carceral system that has locked up the highest number of people per capita in the world (a disproportionate number of them men and women of color), all these radiate like so many perpetual disturbances inside the prevailing middle class social order. A correlative of this is of course the rough and tumble of cyberspace, fought over unrelentingly by both the official and unofficial Americas. In the current malaise produced by an unmistakably steep decline in the country's economy, disruptive themes like the growing difference between rich and poor, the extraordinary profligacy and corruption of the corporate higher echelons, and the manifest danger to the social security system through various audaciously rapacious schemes of privatisation, continue to take a heavy toll out of the firmly held and much celebrated virtues of the capitalist system that is uniquely American. Is America indeed united behind this president, his bellicose foreign policy, and his dangerously simple-minded economic vision? This is another way of asking whether American identity has been settled once and for all and whether for a world that has to live with its far- reaching military power (there are American troops now in dozens of countries) there is something monolithic that the rest of the world that isn't willing to be quiescent can deal with as a sort of fixed entity lurching all over the place with the full support of all 'Americans'. I have tried to suggest another way of seeing America as indeed a troubled country with a more contested actuality than is usually ascribed to it. I think it is more accurate to apprehend America as embroiled in a serious clash of identities whose counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout the rest of the world. America may have won the Cold War, as the popular phrase has it, but the actual results of that victory within America are very far from clear, the struggle not yet over. Too much of a focus on the American executive's centralising military and political power ignores the internal dialectics that continue and are nowhere near being settled. Abortion rights and the teaching of natural evolution are still issues of unsettled contentiousness. The great fallacy of Fukuyama's thesis about the end of history, or for that matter Huntington's clash of civilisation theory, is that both wrongly assume that cultural history is a matter of clear-cut boundaries or of beginnings, middles and ends, whereas in fact, the cultural- political field is much more an arena of struggle over identity, self-definition and projection into the future. They are fundamentalists when it comes to fluid, turbulent cultures in constant process, trying to impose fixed boundaries and internal rules of order where none really can exist. Cultures, specially America's, which is in effect an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one of the perhaps unintended consequences of globalisation is the appearance of transnational communities of global interests, as in the human rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement and so on. America is not at all insulated from any of this, but one has to excavate beyond the intimidatingly unified surface to see what lies beneath, so as to be able to join in that set of disputes, to which many of the people of the world are a party. There is hope and encouragement to be gained from that view. © Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved