Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006 - 10:14 am:

---

Quote:

The Israeli left, which until Arafat's rejection at camp David and the launching of the second intifada, held sway over a majority of Israeli public opinion, has actively worked to undermine Israeli settlement policy in the WB and Gaza, has defended the rights of Palestinians, and has been ENORMOUSLY critical of its own country, particularly with regard to the issue of settlements and the first invasion of Lebanon, not to mention government corruption and the rights of women.

---

Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006 - 5:23 pm:

---

Quote:

Another American reporter described the following incident in Gaza in June 2001: "It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker. 'Come on, dogs,' the voice booms in Arabic. 'Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!' I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: 'Son of a bitch!' 'Son of a whore!' 'Your mother's ••••!' The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos. Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered--death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo--but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport." ["A Gaza Diary: Scenes from the Palestinian Uprising," by Chris Hedges, Harper's magazine, October 2001

---

Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006 - 6:35 pm:

---

Quote:

Hedges was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He published his most recent book, "Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America" in June 2005. The book, inspired by the Polish filmmaker Krysztof Kieslowski's series The Decalogue, follows people, including the author, whose lives have been consumed by one of the violations or issues raised by a commandment. The Christian Century said of the book: "Far from the grandstanding around stone tablets in front of an Alabama courthouse comes Losing Moses on the Freeway, a refreshing reflection on the ten great Mosaic laws that is muted yet monumental in its own right." Hedges is also the author of "What Every Person Should Know About War," a book he worked on with several combat veterans. Robert Pinsky, reviewing this book in The New York Times, called the book "...arresting, peculiar" and "significant." "Neither jingoistic nor pacifist," Pinsky wrote, "the book is about the moral authority of information, as it applies to the present and future nature of war." Hedges will publish a book on the Christian right, a movement which he has criticized, with The Free Press in January 2007.

Hedges, who speaks Arabic and spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was an early and vocal critic of the plan to invade and occupy Iraq. He questioned the rationale for war by the Bush administration and was often critical of the early press coverage, calling it "shameful cheerleading." Hedges delivered a 2003 Commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Ill. shortly after President Bush landed with great fanfare on an aircraft carrier in which he told the graduating class "we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power and security." He added: "This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war of liberation by Iraqis from American occupation." Hedges raised the ire of several hundred members of the audiance who booed and jeered his talk. His microphone was cut twice and two young men rushed the stage to try and prevent him from speaking. Hedges had to cut short his address and was escorted off campus by security officials before the ceremony was over. His address made national news and saw numerous attacks against him by right-wing pundits including an editorial in The Wall Street Journal denouncing Hedges for his anti-war stance. The New York Times issued Hedges a formal reprimand after the address for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality." Hedges left the paper not long after this incident to write books and teach.

Hedges, who is not a pacifist and supports humanitarian interventions, such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo designed to stop campaigns of genocide, nevertheless describes war as "the most potent narcotic invented by humankind." He argues that violence has a dark fascination, something the Bible calls "the lust of the eye." He writes that war is the pornography of violence, that "it has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque." "War," he writes, "gives us a distorted sense of self. It gives us meaning. It creates a feeling of comradeship that obliterates our alienation and makes us feel, for perhaps the first time in our lives, that we belong." War, Hedges wrote, exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. We are all culpable. War is about worshipping the death instinct, which Hedges, quoting Freud, refers to as Thanatos, the Greek God of death. War, he argues, starts out looking and feling like love, the chief emotion war destroys, leads to the annihilation of the other and finally to self-annihilation. War, he writes, is as close as we come to attaining a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. His book draws heavily from his own experience and the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr.

Hedges, strongly influenced by writers such as George Orwell, Samuel Johnson, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, began his career reporting on the conflict in El Salvador in 1983. He went to Latin America, ruled at the time by a series of despotic military regimes, following seminary because, as he said, "it was as close as my generation could come to fighting fascism." Following six years in Latin America he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and Kosovo and later joined the investigative team of The New York Times where he was based in Paris.

"War and conflict have marked most of adult life," he writes in "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." "I began covering insurgenices in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally Kosovo. I have been in ambushes on despolate streteches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I have seen too much of violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time. It is never easy when they surface."

Hedges, the son of a Presbyterian minister, has a B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard University. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard during the academic year of 1998-1999. He has a strong grounding in the classics and knows Greek and Latin, as well as Arabic, French and Spanish. He currently writes for numerous publications including Foreign Affairs, Harper's magazine, The New York Review of Books, Granta and Mother Jones.

---

Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006 - 6:57 pm:

---

Quote:

Amnesty International Media Award

Winner, Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, for “A Gaza Diary” by Chris Hedges (October 2001)

---