Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) extra-judicially executed the founder and spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas Sheikh Ahmad Yasin while leaving a mosque after he performed his predawn prayers in Gaza City early Monday. Pandora?s box has been opened. We are counting down” until the next Palestinian attack “and the question is how many Israelis will be killed,” said Yossi Beilin the former Israeli justice minister and co-author of the unofficial Geneva Initiative. Hamas vindicated Beilin?s warning. The Hamas leadership said, “Sharon has opened the gates of hell. And nothing will stop us from cutting off his head”.

The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth. What is different today is that the weak have learned how to attack the strong, and the western crusaders’ most recent colonial terrorism (as many as 55,000 Iraqis killed) exposes “us” to retaliation. The source of much of this danger is Israel. A creation, then guardian of the west’s empire in the Middle East, the Zionist state remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined.

It was only four months ago that the George W Bush embarked on an historic state visit to London, where the world once again witnessed superpowers taking upon themselves the self-proclaimed moral duty of ridding the world of WMD. They announced themselves as guardians and defenders of ‘innocent people everywhere’. But having unleashed a lethal onslaught of destruction against the people of Iraq in the name of guaranteeing security for the world, it has since transpired that no weapons of mass destruction have been found at all. The burning question has therefore become, was the attack legally justified? Is ‘intelligence’ a truly a sound basis for just war or simply a tool used to justify political objectives? And what criteria should be used to dictate who has the right to own weapons of mass destruction?

The US-led international “stabilization” force that descended on Haiti after Washington engineered a coup against the Caribbean-island country?s elected president has begun moving aggressively into urban areas loyal to deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The force?s stated aim is to restore order by disarming both pro-and anti-Aristide groups. But its targeting of the slums of Port-au-Prince underscores that the principal goal of the stabilization force is to quell popular opposition to Haiti?s new US-installed regime. The force?s intrusion into the poorer neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince stands in sharp contrast to the hands off approach toward the rebel army that the Bush administration and Haiti?s self-styled democratic opposition used to topple Aristide.

The invasion of Iraq, which began one year ago today, was “organised with lies”, says the new Spanish Prime Minister. Does anyone doubt this any more? Set the carnage of the war and occupation in Iraq against the Madrid atrocity. Terrible though that act of terrorism was, it was small compared with the terrorism of the American-led “coalition”. Yes, terrorism. How strange it reads when it describes the actions of “our” governments. So saturated are we in the West in the devilry of Third World tyrants (most of them the products of Western imperialism) that we have lost all sense of the enormous crime committed in our name.

The lack of access to medical services resulting from the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is having devastating effects on the population, a conference held at the University of Illinois in Chicago on March 7 concluded. Heightened maternity deaths, increasing numbers of traumatized patients suffering from lack of treatment, emergency services unable to come to the rescue of the injured, acute malnutrition, anaemia and stunting among Palestinian children are but a few of the dramatic consequences of the occupation since the outbreak of the second Intifada.

If the House of Saud held out any hope that the post-September 11, 2001, demonization of their kingdom was finally waning, then someone in Riyadh should pick up a copy of a recently published neo-conservative roadmap for “winning” the “war on terror”. In it, David Frum, an ex-speechwriter for President George W Bush (and inventor of the term “axis of evil"), and Richard Perle, the eminence grise of the neo-con fraternity, suggest that the United States should bring Saudi Arabia to heel by threatening to support independence for the country’s Eastern Province, where much of Saudi Arabia’s minority Shi’ite population and, coincidentally, most of its oil is situated.

Well, I’m still sneezing heavily with this bout of influenza, and don’t feel up to doing anything much on the web site at the moment. Please check back this weekend (March 6th - 7th), by which time I may or may not have recovered enough to come back to work proper. In the meantime, why not read this excellent article, which discusses the profound problems of identity that advanced capitalist societies face, and which I couldn’t not publish.