August 19,2003


THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE


by Caoimhe Butterly in Baghdad


Anwar Adel Khardom points  to her heavily pregnant,shrapnel-sprayed stomach as she fluctuates between composure and frantic, inconsolable grief. 'What sort of life will this child be born into?' Her thirteen year old daughter Hadil, frail arms bruised and scarred with shrapnel, head bandaged with white gauze, remains wide-eyed and observant, fanning her mother with a woven fan as the heat of an oppressive, airless day reaches it's midday climax.The room is crowded with relatives and friends who drink the bitter coffee and cry and keen in memory of  Anwar's husband, Adel, her 18-year old son Haider, 17-year old daughter Ola, and 8-year old daughter Mervat-all shot dead by U.S.soldiers seven days before. 'How could they, why did they do it-they must of known we were a family-how could they kill my babies?', Anwar asks continually as she holds a picture of her beautiful, smiling children immortalised on the black banners hung on the outside walls of her family home,each of their names withshaheed (martyr) scripted next to it, proclaiming the family's tragedy to the hushed street outside.



The car that carried Anwar's family into a  line of fire that pumped more than twenty bullets through the windshield and chassis into the warm living flesh,vital organs and skulls of her husband and children remains outside.The seats and headrests were ripped apart by bullets and remain covered in faded,darkened bloodstains.Hadil's blood-stained handprints on the outside of the car are the same colour,left there as she groped her way out of the car that held dead Ola and Haider and dying Adel and Mervat, trying to follow her mother as Anwar ran towards the house they had just come from,screaming for help. No help came,at 9:30 p.m. on August 7 in Hyatt al Tunis,a residential neighborhood in Baghdad.U.S. soldiers continued to shoot so erratically at anyone attempting to help the wounded,that they proceeded to injure at least five other civilians and two of their own soldiers, as other troops stationed in a military base stationed at the end of the street joined in. Ground troops from the First Brigade,First Armoured Division proceeded to fire round after round into the darkened street ,shattering the quiet of a summer night and destroying the remnants of tolerance held by that,and many other communities,towards an occupational presence whose benign veneer grows thinner by the day. When the up to twenty minutes of constant shooting stopped,three civilians were dead and more wounded.Saef A.,a 21-year old university student, who drove in a car with two friends down the same road into the path of U.S. occupational forces(who were in the process of raiding and searching a local store,and ,having been subjected to the standard continual diet of mis-information and racism,suitably terrified enough to view all Iraqis as potential or actual enemies)was shot repeatedly and then-as his two friends,both wounded,leapt out of the car,witnesses report seeing a soldier approaching the car, point a gun with a grenade-launcher attached at the still-living Saef, and shoot, causing the car, and Saef's body to be engulfed in flames.

"No, It's Not Anti-Semitic

Judith Butler

Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent. -- Lawrence Summers, 17 September 2002

When the president of Harvard University declared that to criticise Israel at this time and to call on universities to divest from Israel are 'actions that are anti-semitic in their effect, if not their intent', he introduced a distinction between effective and intentional anti-semitism that is controversial at best. The counter-charge has been that in making his statement, Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not in intent. Although he insisted that he meant nothing censorious by his remarks, and that he is in favour of Israeli policy being 'debated freely and civilly', his words have had a chilling effect on political discourse. Among those actions which he called 'effectively anti-semitic' were European boycotts of Israel, anti-globalisation rallies at which criticisms of Israel were voiced, and fund-raising efforts for organisations of 'questionable political provenance'. Of local concern to him, however, was a divestment petition drafted by MIT and Harvard faculty members who oppose Israel's current occupation and its treatment of Palestinians. Summers asked why Israel was being 'singled out . . . among all nations' for a divestment campaign, suggesting that the singling out was evidence of anti-semitic intentions. And though he claimed that aspects of Israel's 'foreign and defence' policy 'can be and should be vigorously challenged', it was unclear how such challenges could or would take place without being construed as anti-Israel, and why these policy issues, which include occupation, ought not to be vigorously challenged through a divestment campaign. It would seem that calling for divestment is something other than a legitimately 'vigorous challenge', but we are not given any criteria by which to adjudicate between vigorous challenges that should be articulated, and those which carry the 'effective' force of anti-semitism.