Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.  V. I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074  www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk     [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]        
No 1146 July 30 2002                                                                                                                                       25p 
EPSR publication in August will not be regularly weekly.

Fake-'left' concentrates on incidental details and speculative fantasies about capitalist tyranny so as to shirk the issue about whether the whole imperialist system is facing a revolutionary crisis, and to abandon Marxism. It is the economic method itself of profitable exploitation which is falling apart, not any particular resource problem or ethical scandal, - and it is the intolerable contradictions in class-war politics in general which is bringing imperialism down, not any specific industrial or frontline conflicts, which act only as catalysts. And Marxism's social-revolution basis for any worthwhile political or economic analysis is ignored by fake-'lefts' to help conceal their practical, reformist, class-collaboration-with-imperialism stances now, and their rotten class collaboration-with-imperialism origins in Revisionism and Trotskyism. Defence of Arafatite class-collaborative weakness in Palestine is another smokescreen to prevent revolutionary light being shed on the Revisionist insanity which agreed to Zionist colonisation of Palestine in the first place, in 1948. The worldwide dictatorial tyranny against any criticism of "Israel' is undermining the fight to separate anti-Zionism from anti-semitism. The "two-state solution" remains a sinister, sick, reformist hoax aimed only at destroying revolutionary anti-capitalist understanding. The class essence of life in imperialist crisis Greater Palestine means that the Jews can NEVER take their boot off the Palestinian neck. It will be removed by revolution.

The 'left' world continues to pay lipservice to Marxism but shows it does not even respect the ABC of the science by useless reactions to the colossal international crisis of the imperialist system.

The Middle East focal point of capitalism's turmoil is variously blamed on the West's "unfairness" to the Palestinians; or America's "ruthless greed for oil"; or on the "diversionary persecution" of Iraq for its supposed weapons of mass destruction; or on the "put-up job on Sept 11 by the CIA to pretend that Islamic terrorism was a threat to the world"; etc, etc.

And some of these detailed charges are indeed partly true, or at least imply some tiny portion of the total truth about US imperialism's bullying, provocation-filled, manipulation of world developments in order to suit the USA's prearranged plans for "global military domination", etc, etc.

But they are all also totally misleading because they OBSCURE the scientific nature itself of epochal change when a system's time is up; they MISS the real philosophical depth of what goes wrong in human society relationships which puts the world in such total crisis; and they FAIL to draw attention to the truly important details of the system's workings which help guide mankind's understanding towards the revolutionary consciousness which alone can bring to an end this capitalist disaster for civilisation.

Oil supplies are undoubtedly a key specific immediate issue materially driving the US monopoly bourgeoisie towards its warmongering neo-colonial frenzy; but oil as such is purely incidental. And any other materially-driving greed would be purely incidental too.

If magic discoveries from seawater could tomorrow solve ALL American imperialism's needs, would the global imperialist system still be facing total political-economic crisis???

Of course it would.

The capitalist profits, which have driven civilisation forward miraculously for the last 800 years, are ultimately flawed because they are a specific expression of complex HUMAN relationships and HUMAN exploitation, - not because of their bullying greed for material resources, or their criminally and suicidally wasteful exploitation of them.

It is because the transformation of the world proletariat by capitalism will ultimately no longer allow the working masses to tolerate exploitation and unfairness and periodic wars and disasters any longer, and because international monopoly-bourgeois interests can NEVER STOP endlessly reimposing their class domination EVERYWHERE, that finally gives the answer "to all the burning questions of war and peace", not just in the Middle East but all over the world, - the answer in REVOLUTION.

And with the planet edging relentlessly towards a World War III armageddon of inter-imperialist crisis, and facing the problem of the Western world's working masses still being brainwashed/dominated by fake-'left' reformism and TUC/Labourism, the absolutely crucial message of today is that REVOLUTION is the only possible future for mankind, nothing else.

This fake-'left' domination is not only not upset by exposures of, e.g., the inhuman tyranny of imperialist warmongering Middle East oil-exploitation and associated neocolonial bullying which inflames the region, - this fake-'left' absolutely FEASTS ON such exposures of "all the burning questions of war and peace in this area", etc.

Why? Because just explaining the oil frenzy providing the immediate context of imperialist tyranny, also automatically reinforces the entire philosophical world of "there's always a reformist solution to any problem", etc, etc.

And it is true. In purely rational terms, a fairer solution to the inter competitive monopoly-imperialist greed for oil, in conflict with the Middle East people's wishes for a better life all round, COULD be found.

There is not a 'left' reformist group in the West (and beyond) which does not revel in the exposure (repeatedly) of imperialism's oil exploitation tyranny.

But what they ALL conspire to keep quiet about is that rational solutions will NOT be found. In the reality of the class-war real world, 'rational' (i.e. reformist) solutions are IMPOSSIBLE.

Portentous statements like 

"He who would understand the economics and the politics of the Middle East from the beginning of the 20th century, must learn to spell, pronounce and really grasp the significance and meaning of just the word - OIL.

"This single word furnishes the key which unlocks the door to an understanding of all the burning questions of war and peace in this area, ranging from the struggle of the leading imperialist powers to carve up the Middle East in the aftermath of the first imperialist war of 1914-1918 to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the war in Lebanon, the Gulf war, the war in the Balkans and the war in Afghanistan presently being conducted with characteristic brutality by US and British imperialism," 

etc, etc, sound very fiercely 'left', and anti-capitalist, and even 'revolutionary', - but in today's all important context of the international balance of class forces and class ideologies, they are hollow.

The 'news' of this grab-for-oil by imperialism has been old hat to Marxist analysis precisely since the grabbing began more than 100 years ago. This pattern of human and territorial conflict has been the whole basis for the entire historical epoch of colonial imperialism.

But even such slightly pompous and pointlessly one-sided emphases as these would hardly be worth a mention or a second glance if it were not for their origin.

They are publicity-leafleted extracts promoting "the launch of this very important book" put out by a fake-'left' sect whose problems are the epitome of the entire anti-revolutionary swamp which for generations has been undermining serious anti-imperialism ideologically throughout the world, corrupting and bringing down the Soviet workers state eventually.

And the Lalkar backbone of the wretched Scargillite SLP is not merely recycling as usual its safe old Revisionist "anti-imperialist" propaganda with this book, but is also scrambling a bit desperately too to keep upright because world developments are now shining their harshest light on the very compromise deals of old Stalinist rottenness which helped set up this horrifically confused and tortuously dangerous Middle East imperialist powder-keg in the first place in 1948 by insanely agreeing to allow Zionist agents from Western imperialism to come in and colonise Palestine.

The big issue Lalkar is on the spot over is the continuing contemporary running-sore of the explosive Middle East situation (which exactly reflects and draws attention to that original impossible nonsense which was foisted on the region of allowing Zionist colonisation to proceed), - namely the mythical "two-state solution" which is inevitably proving equally impossible to fulfil.

The only positive way to get out of the Third International's Revisionist quagmire of the class-collaborative "peaceful road to socialism" plus Zionist "sharing" of Palestine, etc, - (opened up by the projected "economic disintegration of imperialism" in the face of "superior planned socialist economic competition"), was by returning to the Marxist-Leninist science (of imperialist boom/slump recurring warmongering crises as the driving force of historical developments), and totally denouncing these hopelessly rotten Stalinist 'theories'.

The whole essence of the entire fake-'left', in all its 57 varieties of Trotskyism, centrism, museum-Stalinism, etc, etc, lies in this philistine unwillingness/inability to return to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory. They all endlessly evade that whole question wherever possible, and cover up relentlessly each sect's rotten Revisionist and/or Trotskyist origins.

Posturing ruses about oil, or about the CIA itself doing Sept 11, or about Genoa anti-global anarchists being police stooges, or Hamas and Sharon serving each others needs, etc, etc, etc, are not necessarily without a scrap of truth in all of them, hinting at the sort of non-stop reactionary provocations which the imperialist system won the Cold War with; - but they all DELIBERATELY miss the point. 

The great historical question to be faced by the whole world is whether or not capitalism's injustices can be resolved through piecemeal reformist pressure (as all parliamentarism has always pretended, including Revisionism, Scargillite syndicalism, and all centrism and Trotskyism in practice (with the SWP support for 'left'-Labour candidates; or Trot entryism into the Labour Party, etc, etc)), - or whether on the contrary the Marxist science of history is what needs to be followed which ONLY ever tried to teach REVOLUTIONARY understanding in all things as the sole possible way forward for civilisation, building on the ruins of warmongering imperialist slump destruction.

As typically dithering middle-class tendencies who are unhappy to stick their necks out any further than the most 'left' trade unionist (petty bourgeois compromise) mentality, the entire fake-'left' spends its whole time putting more and more effort into merely posturing about how "anti-imperialist" they really are, - but, of course, without ever finally telling the working class whether the world is heading for rational reform, or total, final, global warmongering, revolutionary upheaval.

What does it matter? Well the bourgeois class-war ideologists have not the slightest doubt that smashing the working-class resistance to slump and war is one thing when the proletariat has been totally disarmed worldwide by generations of Revisionism (and its fake-'left' echoes) into always expecting 'left-pressure reforms' to inevitably finally win the day for sanity and reason - but that taking on an international working class which has deliberately been made CONSCIOUS that revolution is the only possible and sensible answer when capitalist crisis degenerates into its slump-warmongering phase, - is another level of difficulty entirely.

Hence the huge recent bourgeois-press puff pieces for Lula in Brazil and for Tommy Sheridan in Scotland, as just two examples.

What is imperialism hoping to gain by bulling-up this type of "socialist Firebrand"?

Why, endless new Salvador Allendes, of course, - crucial when capitalist crisis conditions have become hopelessly bad but the working class still needs harmlessly diverting aside into safe 'reformist daydream' backwaters where they can be trussed up at leisure, as Pinochet did in Chile after Allende handed him the Chilean working class on a plate by lulling them with crap that "firm parliamentary reforms can do it", etc, etc, - just like the SSP, Lula, the Socialist Alliance, Lalkar's SLP, etc, all say.

In addition to completely disarming the working class about the scientific historical nature of the epochal leap facing mankind, overthrowing the capitalist bourgeoisie in order to make a REVOLUTIONARY socialist transformation to a world of planned rational sufficiency for all (out of the destructive and unjust chaos of imperialism's markets-collapse warmongering slump), - the fake-'left' also undermine workers with the DEFEATIST essence of all these conspiracy theories.

A vitally important part of reality is the increasingly grotesque degenerate INCOMPETENCE and distracted or self-satisfied STUPIDITY of the imperialist system as it crashes in crisis yet again.

But what is conveyed when we hear from Lalkar's NorthWest SLP stablemates, for example, that US imperialism was not taken by surprise and totally shell-shocked by Sept 11 at all, but that the CIA planned, organised, and carried out the whole thing itself, just in order to fabricate some excuse for a "war on terrorism" so that it could blitzkrieg the Middle East???

And what is conveyed when the fake-'left' declare that the Yugoslav-Balkan wars were completely imperialist-manufactured from start to finish as part of some deliberate grandiose American war plan for ultimate US military domination and territorial colonisation to build massive oil-supply pipelines from ex-Soviet Central Asia to the 'safe' Adriatic?????????

Or what are we to conclude about imperialist competence when entire sustained revolutions are sometimes presented by fake-'lefts' as all the deceitful pre-emptive work of imperialist intelligence, - as some Trots used to say about the entire Russian Revolution, for example?????

Or how clever is CIA-Zionist imperialism to have "invented" Hamas and other Islamic terrorist guerrillas just in order to play into Sharon's hands, etc, etc, etc,   etc???????

Deepdown, unstated, - the only possible conclusion to draw from all this is that (a) no spontaneous own-goal, enemy-action disasters ever befall the imperialist system; and that (b) the imperialists never-endingly plan and successfully carry out such brilliantly masterful subterfuges that only the maddest day-dreamers could ever think that something like the Bolshevik Revolution would ever be allowed by imperialism ever to succeed again; etc, etc, etc.

And this ludicrous petty bourgeois defeatism streak within the fake-'left' by no means stops with their barmy conspiracy-fantasies.

From the SLP to the Trots, their 'super-revolutionary' self-conceit has seen them all contemptuously dismiss the remarkable Good Friday Agreement achievements (of Sinn Féin and the IRA's triumphant 30-year guerrilla-war struggle) as a "failed peace process" and "routed by a US-imperialist imposed settlement" which will "legitimise Partition", etc, etc, etc, - but always refusing to answer the huge volumes of evidence that the EPSR has consistently presented, demonstrating how the hated and discredited old colonial dictatorship of bogus 'Northern Ireland' has been fatally undermined by the 30-year guerrilla war revolutionary triumph which, via the Good Friday Agreement, will lead to the reunification of Ireland in our lifetime, and probably much sooner.

The entire fake-'left' have all equally declared the "terrorist" onslaught on US imperialism also to be a "failure" and to be "condemned", utterly missing the point (because spontaneous worldwide revolutionary upsurges are a concept completely alien to their "TU organised left pressure reformist" thinking) that the proletariat of the whole planet has been intrigued, stimulated, and delighted by this audacious "terrorist" resistance to US imperialist domination (and equally by Hamas, etc, "terrorist" resistance to Zionist imperialist domination), etc.

And finally, on top of all this anti-revolutionary disarming that the fake-'left' devotes all its energies to, and the conspiracy fantasising, plus all the pure defeatism, this Revisionist smokescreen for avoiding facing up to their crap philosophical petty bourgeois-ness, (as exemplified by the still monstrous but still uncorrected Stalinist theoretical mistakes), actually gets the detailed workings of imperialist destructive warmongering wrong too when it exclusively emphasises the oil question.

It will open a far more revolutionarily educative perspective for working-class anti-imperialist understanding if the likely future 'over-production' of oil were looked at instead of speculative militarization scenarios about imperialism conducting foreign policy with an eye to securing (as it has always done for more than a century) guaranteed future oil supplies (or whatever), etc.

It is a complete misunderstanding of Marxism to imply that the imperialist system is in crisis, focused on the Middle East in particular ("all the burning questions of war and peace in this area") because of territorial oil-pipeline frustrations, or whatever.

US warmongering is on the march (in the Middle East and everywhere) because its global economic system (and therefore political control) is falling apart due to an insane "overproduction" crisis of collapsing profits.

It is the total productive basis of the capitalist class system of society which is in trouble, and not its oil-supplies at all, or any other particular problem or requirement.

Such a major global industry as oil will of course always be a significant incidental detailed feature of some of the actual workings of the imperialist crisis, - but it lets CAPITALISM ITSELF off the hook entirely, and is a COMPLETE TRAVESTY of Marxism, to pointless pretend that oil as such "unlocks the door to an understanding of all the burning questions of war and peace in this area".

And it is well worth pedantically insisting on this point when the wretched reason for this fake-'left' oil industry concentration is so as to distract attention from the insoluble HUMAN political disaster in Palestine, which much more graphically and interestingly reveals the revolutionary future of the world to mankind, & which much more requires a history of rotten imperialist/Revisionist-era PHILOSOPHY as its deeper explanation rather than oil (which directly does not motivate the Palestinian REVOLUTION one bit, the key to the only real SOLUTION to "all the burning questions of war and peace in this area" by pointing the way to the DEFEAT of imperialist warmongering).

If there really is a need for aphoristic shorthand to sum up the Middle East focal point of imperialist crisis, which is key to the world imperialist crisis, that word would be PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION, and not oil.

And one of the main ingredients making this so is, once again, not oil but something even more permanent, and timeless, and material, - namely the unalterable political-philosophy of colonial-imperialism, - the essential political-economic human relationship of capitalist production (a key to civilisation for the last 800 years, much longer than oil) which incurably imposes the 'kill-or-be-killed' class-war material imperative on (ultimately) the whole character of the whole of society or else it can no longer remain capitalism (class-war and national-war domination).

This irresistible material imperative forces the Zionist ruling class to keep its boot on the neck of its exploited Palestinian subjects (and their exploited lands) or else 'Israel' will be no more.

It will be claimed that such stark 'clever sounding' theory does not get reflected in the typical fudge and mudge of class-compromising confused reality.

Just the opposite. If it is insisted that a capitalist 'Israel' remain a reality, then it can be incontrovertibly deduced that as night follows day, the persecution of the Palestinians can NEVER come to an end.

Minus any philosophical deductions, the capitalist press's own 'reports' of the region invariably agree with this conclusion, or point to it.

And for example, just take the very latest incident out of this week's coverage, not a major event, and not a specially selected cutting, - but absolutely typical of the insoluble ESSENCE of the human problem in the Middle East (which will not go away (oil or no oil) and will not go away from any other part of the world either (oil or no oil), - the MATERIAL problem of the human ingredients which make up 800 years of capitalism simply being no longer compatible. REVOLUTION is inevitable:

Jewish settlers began attacking Palestinians as they returned home yesterday from the funeral of an Israeli soldier, shooting dead a 14-year-old girl and wounding several others in the West Bank city of Hebron, Palestinians said.

They said the settlers began attacking shortly after the funeral in Hebron's Old City, throwing stones at houses and cars, and breaking windows.

Nizin Jamjoum, 14, was standing on the balcony of her home when she was shot in the head and died, said her brother Marwan, 26, who was injured.

At least six Palestinians were hurt, including one who was stabbed, Palestinians said. The Israeli army said it was only aware of one injured Palestinian, and that he had received treatment from the troops. It said it was trying to reduce the tension in Hebron, where several hundred Jewish settlers live among more than 100,000 Palestinians.

The city was shut down for the funeral of Elazar Leibovitz, a Hebron resident, who was one of four Israelis shot dead on Friday in an ambush.

Before the funeral Israeli forces reimposed a curfew by throwing stun grenades and firing teargas to disperse Palestinians crowding the main market area.

In Burkin, south-west of Jenin, Israeli soldiers arrested Mohammed Abu Tabikh, 22, a member of the military wing of Islamic Jihad, and two others in the village of Burkin, south-west of Jenin, members of the group said.

The soldiers ordered the family of Majid Tayeb, a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, to leave the family home in the village.  Tayeb was killed a year ago when a stolen car he had recently bought blew up with him inside.

After the family's departure tanks destroyed the building with shellfire, Palestinians in the village said. The army said it was checking the report.

Two cars outside the home of Mohammed Afaneh, a Hamas member arrested 20 days ago were blown up by the troops, residents said.

In Ramallah Israeli special forces arrested a prominent Hamas figure, Hussein Abu Kwaik, and four other members. In March Mr Abu Kwaik's wife and three  children, 10,12 and 13, were killed by an Israeli tank shell as she drove them home from school in Ramallah.

To stretch a point, the colonising ruling-class MIGHT be got out of Hebron (beyond the 1967 military-conquest front line, the last 'compromise' point that idiotic "lets-call-it-quits" arguments generally go back to (and obviously illogically to all serious Zionists)).

But getting the colonising ruling class away from the Hebron flashpoints (and possibly scores of other flashpoints too) cannot possibly alter the capitalist ruling-class productive reality of this country, which is that the Zionists will dominate, and the Palestinians (and ALL their lands, - lost before, or lost since) will remain the eternal exploited underdogs, creating more and more flashpoints exponentially as their relentlessly TRANSFORMED proletarian status (after 800 years of accumulating working-class culture of resentment and fightback against exploitation and class-discrimination) increasingly makes class-domination no longer tolerable.

The 'two-state solution' Revisionist cop-out (which this Lalkar oil smokescreen is shamelessly being used to conceal or distract attention from) is just a silly reformist fantasy.

Even if the Palestinians were ever weak enough, or divided enough, or stupid enough to enact out the pretence of having their "own, independent state" (when, in reality it will be totally subjugated to past Zionist military conquests and to current Zionist "security" demands, of all invasive and humiliating kinds), - the only ECONOMIC reality would quickly become total Zionist-imperialist market domination once again (and for as long as the international capitalist system lasts).

And in an epoch of WORSENING economic crisis everywhere anyway, (which is producing more and more revolutions and national/civil wars everywhere as it is), - why would the already-fired-up and hate-filled Palestinian masses not IMMEDIATELY start demanding the revolutionary overthrow of the Zionist ruling class again anyway?????

Only in the eternal 'left'-reformist fantasies of the fake-'Marxist' petty bourgeois world can such ludicrously unlikely proposals as a "two-state solution" be taken even remotely seriously.

Other fake-'lefts' are already chiming in against this Marxist-Leninist revolutionary perspective with chants of "anti-semitism", but purely irrational prejudice against Jews as such has nothing whatever to do with it.

It is not anti-semitic to denounce modern Zionism as incurably condemnable colonialism, now indelibly stained with fascist aggressiveness out of the very contradiction that the founding itself of the state of 'Israel' inevitably places ALL the Jews of Palestine in. Concentrating on the Neturei Karta exception (and other 'peace' campaigners) only emphasises the ABSOLUTE rule that if ANY state of 'Israel' exists in Palestine under capitalism, then it will INEVITABLY be a colonial-domination state of PERMANENT exploitation of the Palestinians and their lands ('present' lands, and 'past' lands (only in still living memory)) which the modern anti-imperialist world is not going to be able to tolerate much longer ANYWHERE on the planet, let alone the explosive and resentment filled Middle East.

And when it comes to deranged prejudices, dredged up from the foulest historical pits of backward human culture, then anti-semitism and semitism (including the recent massacres at Jenin and Gaza City, and the non-stop HUMILIATION (home destructions, checkpoints, etc, etc, - see above capitalist press report and a million other such reports over the years)) seem almost equally contemptible obscurantisms which more advanced human culture could usefully remain critical of to everyone's benefit, - as this following capitalist press report inadvertently would seem to indicate:

Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, the Californian audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish host of KPFA  Radio's Flashpoint, current affairs programme, was reading some recent e-mails that he had received from Israel's supporters in America. Each one left the people in the church - Muslims, Jews, Christians in a state of shock.  

"You mother-fucking-asshole-self hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!"

Bernstein' s sin was to have covered the story of Israel's invasion of Jenin in April and to have interviewed journalists who investigated the killings that took place there - including Phil Reeves and Justin Huggler of The Independent, - for his Flashpoint programme. Bernstein's grandfather was a revered Orthodox Rabbi of international prominence but neither his family history nor his origins spared him. 

"Read this and weep, you mother-fucker self-hating Jew boy!!!" another e-mail told Bernstein. "God willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and slash your kids' throats. " Yet another: "I hope that you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors anti-American cop haters will die a violent and cruel death just like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel." 

Lubin is also Jewish, the executive director of the Middle East Children's Alliance, a one-time committed Zionist but now one of Israel's fiercest critics. Her e-mails are even worse.

Indeed, you have to come to America to realise just how brave this small but vocal Jewish community is. Bernstein is the first to acknowledge that a combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative Christian fundamentalists have in effect censored all free discussion on Israel and the Middle East out of the public domain in the US. 

"Everyone else is terrified," Bernstein says. "The only ones who begin to open their mouths are the Jews in this country. You know, as a kid, I sent money to plant trees in Israel. But now we are horrified by a government representing a country that we grew up loving and cherishing. Israel's defenders have a special vengeance for Jews who don't fall in line behind Sharon's scorched-earth policy because they give the lie to the charge that Israel's critics are simply anti-Semite."

Adam Shapiro is among those who have paid a price for their beliefs. He is a Jew engaged to an American-born Palestinian, a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement who was trapped in Yasser Arafat's headquarters in the spring while administering medical aid. After telling CNN that the a Sharon government was acting like "terrorists" while receiving $3bn a year in US military aid, Shapiro and his family were savaged in the New  York Post. The paper slandered Shapiro as the "Jewish Taliban" and demeaned his family as "traitors".

Israeli supporters publicised his family's address and his parents were forced to flee their Brooklyn home and seek police protection. Shapiro's father, a New York public high-school teacher and a part-time Yeshiva (Jewish day school) teacher, was fired from his job. His brother receives regular death threats.

Israel's supporters have no qualms about their alliance with the Christian right. Indeed, the fundamentalists can campaign on their own in Israel's favour, as I discovered for myself at Stanford recently when I was about to give a lecture on the media and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, part of a series of talks arranged largely by Jewish Americans. A right-wing Christian "Free Republic" outfit posted my name on its website, and described me as a "PLO buttkisser" and asked its supporters to "freep" my lecture. A few demonstrators turned up outside the First United Methodist Church in Sacramento where I was to speak, waving American and Israeli flags. "Jew haters!" they screamed at the organisers, a dark irony since these were non-Jews shrieking their abuse at Jews.

They were also handing out crudely printed flyers. "Nothing to worry about, Bob," one of my Jewish hosts remarked. "They can't even spell your name right." True. But also false. "Stop the Lies!" the leaflet read. "There was no massacre in Jenin. Fiske [sic] is paid big bucks to spin [lie] for the Arabs..."  But the real lie was in that last sentence. I never take any payment for lectures - so that no one can ever claim that I'm paid to give the views of others. But the truth didn't matter to these people. Nor did the content of my talk which began, by chance, with the words "There was no massacre" - in which I described Arafat as a "corrupt, vain little despot" and suicide bombings as "a fearful, evil weapon". None of this was relevant. The aim was to shut me up.

Dennis Bernstein sums it up quite simply: "Any US journalist, columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public official or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an antiSemite." In fact, no sooner had Bernstein made these remarks than pro-Israeli groups initiated an extraordinary campaign against some of the most pro-Israeli newspapers in America, all claiming that The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle were biased in their coverage of the Middle-East conflict. Just how The New York Times - which boasts William Safire and Charles Krauthammer, those giants of pro-Israeli bias, among its writers - could be anti-Israeli is difficult to see, although it is just possible that, amid its reports on Israel's destruction in the West Bank and Gaza, some mildly critical comments found their way into print. The New York Times, for example, did report that Israeli soldiers used civilians as human shields - though only in the very last paragraph of a dispatch from Jenin.

None the less, the campaign of boycotts and emails got under way. More than 1,000 readers suspended their subscriptions to the Los Angeles Tunes, while a blizzard of e-mails told pro-Israeli readers to cancel their  subscription to The New York Times for a day. On the East Coast, at least one local radio station has lost $1m from a Jewish philanthropist while other stations attempting to cover the Middle East with some degree of fairness are said to have lost even more. When the San Francisco Chronicle published a  four-page guide to the conflict, its editors had to meet a 14 member delegation of local Jewish groups to discuss their grievances.

According to Michael Futterman, who chairs the Middle East strategy committee of 80 Bay Area synagogues, Jewish anger hit "boiling point" when the Chronicle failed to cover a pro-Israeli rally in San Francisco. Needless to say, the Chronicle's "Readers' Representative", Dick Rogers, published a grovelling, self-flagellating apology.

"The paper didn't have a word on the pro-Israel rally," he wrote. "This wasn't fair and balanced coverage." Another objection came from a Jewish reader who objected to the word "terror" being placed within inverted commas in a Chronicle headline that read "Sharon says 'terror' justifies assault". The reader's point? The Chronicle's reporting "harmonises well with Palestinian propaganda, which tries to divert attention from the terrorist campaign against Israel (which enjoys almost unanimous support among Palestinians, all the way from Yasser Arafat to the 10-year-old who dreams of blowing himself up one day) and instead describes Israel's military moves as groundless, evil bullying tactics."

And so it goes on. On a radio show with me in Berkeley, the Chronicle's foreign editor, Andrew Ross, tried to laugh off the influence of the pro-Israeli lobby -  "the famous lobby", he called it with that deference that is half way between acknowledgement and fear - but the Israeli Consul General Yossi Amrani had no hesitation in campaigning against the Chronicle, describing a paper largely docile in its reporting of the Middle East as "a professionally and politically biased,  pro-Palestinian newspaper".

The Chronicle's four-page pull-out on the Middle East was, in fact, a soft sell. Its headline - "The Current Strife Between The Israelis And The Palestinians Is A Battle For Control Of Land" - missed the obvious point: that one of the two groups that were "battling for control of the land" - the Palestinians - had been occupied by Israel for 35 years.

The most astonishing - and least covered - story is in fact the alliance of Israeli lobbyists and Christian Zionist fundamentalists, a coalition that began in 1978 with the publication of a Likud plan to encourage fundamentalist churches to give their support to Israel. By 1980, there was an "International Christian Embassy" in Jerusalem; and in 1985, a Christian Zionist lobby emerged at a "National Prayer Breakfast for Israel" whose principal speaker was Benjamin Netanyahu, who was to become Israeli prime minister.

"A sense of history, poetry and morality imbued the Christian Zionists who, more than a century ago, began to write, plan and organise for Israel's restoration," Netanyahu told his audience. The so-called National Unity Coalition for Israel became a lobbying arm of Christian Zionism with contacts in Congress and neo-conservative think-tanks in Washington.

In May this year, the Israeli embassy in Washington, no less, arranged a prayer breakfast for Christian Zionists. Present were Alonzo Short, a member of the board of "Promise Keepers", and Michael Little who is president of the "Christian Broadcasting Network". Event hosts were listed as  including those dour old Christian conservatives Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who once financed a rogue television station in southern Lebanon which threatened Muslim villagers and broadcast tirades by Major Saad Haddad, Israel's stooge militia leader in Lebanon.

But the Israeli lobby is powerful. In fact, its influence over the US Congress and Senate calls into question the degree to which the American legislature has been corrupted by lobby groups. It is to an Israeli voice - Avnery again - that Americans have to turn to hear just how mighty the lobby has become. 

"Its electoral and financial power casts a long shadow over both houses of the Congress," Avnery writes. "Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen were elected with the help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the directives of the Jewish lobby is political suicide. If the AIPAC were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 Senators and 300 Congressmen would sign it at once. This lobby frightens the media, too, and assures their adherence to Israel."

Avnery could have looked no further than the Democratic primary in Alabama last month for proof of his assertion. Earl Hilliard, the five-term incumbent, had committed the one mortal sin of any American politician: he had expressed sympathy for the cause of the Palestinians. He had also visited Libya several years ago. Hilliard's opponent, Artur Davis, turned into an outspoken supporter of Israel and raised large amounts of money from the Jewish community, both in Alabama and nationwide. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz noted that among the names of the first list of contributors to Davis's campaign funds were "10 Cohens from New York and New Jersey, but before one gets to the Cohens, there were Abrams, Ackerman, Adler, Amir, Asher, Baruch, Basok, Berger, Berman, Bergman, Bernstein and Blumenthal. All from the East Coast, Chicago and Los Angeles. It's highly unlikely any of them have ever visited Alabama..." 

The Jewish newspaper Forward - essential reading for any serious understanding of the American Jewish community - quoted a Jewish political activist following the race: "Hilliard has been a problem in his votes and with guys like that, when there's any conceivable primary challenge, you take your shot." Hilliard, of course, lost to Davis, whose campaign funds reached $781,000.

The AIPAC concentrates on Congress while the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations (CPMAJO) made up of the heads of 51 Jewish organisations, concentrates on the executive branch of the US government. Every congressman knows the names of those critics of Israel who have been undone by the lobby. Take Senator J William Fulbright, whose 1963 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee detailed how five million tax-deductible dollars from philanthropic Americans had been sent to Israel and then recycled back to the US for distribution to organisations seeking to influence public opinion in favour of Israel; this cost him the chance of being Secretary of State. He was defeated in the 1974 Democratic primary after pro-Israeli money poured into the campaign funds of his rival, Governor Dale Bumpers, following a statement by the AIPAC that Fulbright was "consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters  in this country". 

Paul Findley, who spent 22 years as a Republican congressman from Illinois, found his political career destroyed after he had campaigned against the Israeli lobby - although, ironically, his book on the subject, They Dare to Speak Out was nine weeks on The Washington Post bestseller list, suggesting that quite a number of Americans want to know why their congressmen are so pro-Israeli. 

Just two months ago, the US House of Representatives voted 352 to 21 to express its unqualified support for Israel. The Senate voted 94 to two for the same motion. Even as they voted, Ariel Sharon's army was continuing its destructive invasion of the West Bank. "I do not recall any member of Congress asking me if I was in favour of patting Israel on the back..." James Abu Rizk an Arab-American of Lebanese origin, told the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee afterwards. "No one else, no average American, has been asked either. But that is the state of American politics today... The votes and bows have nothing to do with the legislators' love for Israel. They have everything to do with the money that is fed into their campaigns by members of the Israeli lobby. My estimate is that $6bn flows from the American Treasury to Israel each year." 

Within days, 42 US governors turned up in Sacramento to sign declarations supporting Israel. California governor Gray Davis and New York governor George Pataki - California has the largest Jewish population of any state except New York - arranged the meeting.

Sometimes the support of Israel's loyalists in Congress turns into farce. Tom Delay - reacting to CNN founder Ted Turner's criticism of Israel - went so far out of his way to justify Israeli occupation of the West Bank that he blurted out on MSNBC television that the Palestinians "should become citizens" of Israel, an idea unlikely to commend itself to his friend Ariel Sharon. Texas Republican Richard Armey went the other way. "I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank. I happen to believe the Palestinians should leave... to have those people who have been aggressors against Israel retired to some other area." 

Do the people of Texas know that their representative is supporting "ethnic cleansing" in the Middle East? Or are they silent because they prefer not to speak out? 

Censorship takes many forms. When Ishai Sagi and Ram Rahat-Goodman, two Israeli reserve soldiers who refused to serve in the West Bank or Gaza, were scheduled to debate their decision at Sacramento's Congregation B'nai Israel in May, their appearance was cancelled. Steve Meinreith, who is chairman of the Israel Affairs Committee at B'nai Israel, remarked bleakly that "intimidation on the part of certain sectors of the community has  deprived the entire community of hearing a point of view that is being widely debated in Israel. Some people feel it's too dangerous..."

	Does President Bush? His long-awaited Middle East speech was Israeli policy from start to finish. A group of Jewish leaders, including Elie Wiesel and Alan Deshowitz who said recently that the idea of executing the families of Palestinian suicide bombers was a legitimate if flawed attempt at finding a balance between preventing terrorism and preserving democracy -  and the AIPAC and CPMAJO heads all sent clear word to the President that no pressure a should be put on Israel. Wiesel - whose courage permeates his books on the Holocaust but who lamentably failed to condemn the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut in 1982 at the hands of Israel's Lebanese allies, said he felt "sadness", but his sadness was "with Israel, not against Israel" because "after all the Israeli soldiers did not kill" - took out a full page in The New York Times. In this, he urged Bush to please remember that Ariel Sharon, a military man who knows the ugly face of war better than anyone, is ready to make 'painful sacrifices' to end the conflict."

	Sharon, was held "personally responsible" for the massacre by Israel's own commission of inquiry - but there was no mention of that from Wiesel, who told reporters in May that he would like to revoke Arafat's Nobel prize.

President Bush was not going to oppose these pressures. His father may well have lost his re-election because he dared to tell Israel that it must make peace with the Arabs. Bush is not going to make the same mistake - nor does brother Jeb want to lose his forthcoming governorship election. Thus Sharon's delight at the Bush speech, and it was left to a lonely and brave voice - Mitchell Plitnick of the Jewish Voice for Peace - to state that "few speeches could be considered to be as destructive as that of the American President... Few things are as blinding as unbridled arrogance." 	

Or as vicious as the messages that still pour in to Dennis Bernstein and Barbara Lubin, whose Middle East Children's Alliance, co-ordinating with Israeli peace groups, is trying to raise money to rebuild the Jenin refugee camp. "I got a call the other day at 5am," Bernstein told me. "This guy says to me: 'You got a lot of nerve going and eating at that Jewish deli.' 

What comes after that?" Before I left San Francisco, Lubin showed me her latest e-mails. "Dear Cunt," one of them begins, "When we want your opinion you fucking Nazi cunt, we will have one of your Palestinian buddies fuck it [sic] of you. I hope that in your next trip to the occupied territories you are blown to bits by one of your Palestinian buddies [sic] bombs."

Written (or rather 'admitted') by a British bourgeois journalist of Jewish-faith (and race?)-tradition himself, the above torrent of evidence as to why the 'Jewish' lobby is barely distinguishable any longer from the Zionist lobby (which it is slightly less politically incorrect to generalise about and to condemn for their INHERENT philosophical religious nationalist character), shows the danger which all insistent 'Jewishness' could bring upon itself from quite widely-spreading anti-semitic shallowness if this unstemmable Zionist tyranny (that 'Israel' will always be) is not soon condemned far more broadly and far more totally than has been the case hitherto in the fake-'left' corrupted Western world.

But the bad vibrations clearly are widening rapidly.

The following capitalist press report, painting Zionist tyranny in the Middle East in the worst possible light, is now almost routine coverage:

Imad belonged to no political group. The mayor had thrown him in prison for criticising him in his newsletter; he called the Palestinian Authority a "bunch of crooks", although he respected Yasser Arafat; most of the Islamic militants, he said, did not even know their Koran.

He was, above all, an unaffiliated Palestinian nationalist. In 1987 he had been a student leader during the first intifada (uprising), led by teenagers throwing stones. He attended two terms of Bir Zeit University, but had to stop going when the Israelis made travel between West Bank cities impossible and the university was closed for most of the time anyway.

In the new intifada that began 22 months ago, he felt his best role would be to get at the truth of what was happening. On a hot and sunny day last week a gunner on an Israeli tank shot Imad in the leg as he photographed an armoured vehicle that had run into an electricity pole in the central square of Jenin.

According to the Red Crescent charity in Jenin, he bled to death because Israeli soldiers halted the ambulance that was trying to reach him.

The tragedy of his death is heightened by its senselessness. Israelis feel besieged by suicide bombers - justifiably, since 236 people have been killed in such attacks aimed at civilians. But Iman's friends say that is no excuse for opening fire on an innocent Palestinian journalist, or any other civilian.

The IDF command denies this is happening. I know there is unprovoked firing on civilians because I survived a similar situation with Imad.

We were walking out of the Jenin camp in the late afternoon, on a street filled with women and children returning to temporary shelter in the city after seeing their destroyed homes for the first time.

I heard the grinding gears of a tank pulling around the corner, and then the terrifying sound of the machine gun on its turret firing a fusillade of bullets in our direction. There was no provocation, no attack.

I had a flak jacket marked in yellow tape with foot-high letters "TV", identifying me as a journalist - in theory in any language - as did Imad. It made no difference. The soldier who was firing was about 20 yards away with a clear line of sight.

There was very little shelter on a street lined with closed shops. We threw ourselves behind a low concrete wall as bullets streamed past at chest height, Women screamed; a little boy sobbing with fear clung to my legs. A man across the street opened the door of his house and yelled for us to run to him for refuge but there was no way of crossing. 

That night I realised how brave Imad was. The tank rolled down the street to our hiding place. The turret swivelled to point directly at us. We were silent, except for the little boy, who sobbed more loudly and hid his eyes. Then the turret popped up, and a soldier yelled: "Go, go." The women and children huddled around us, hoping the jackets identifying us as journalists would  protect them. 

Dusk was closing in as I reached the flat where I would sleep. I was shaking and all I could think of was getting inside. The group of about 15 women and children who had been following begged us to walk them home across town. A burst of gunfire and the grinding movement of a tank sounded again on the next street. I could not do it.

I had been hit by a grenade a year earlier, and that day I had seemed to feel what it would be like to be struck by a bullet. Imad, however, walked on with them. He told me the next day that the journey had taken him five hours, and he had been shot at twice.

He knew he was taking too many chances. When I told him he had to be more careful, he said: "I'm from Jenin. I'm a journalist. I have the right to walk on my streets. Don't worry..."

The IDF's account of his death is that the armoured vehicle that had run into a pole was attacked by a Palestinian mob throwing fire bombs and firing at the accompanying tank. The tank returned fire in self-defence.

The story is contradicted by eyewitnesses and by pictures taken by Sayeed Dahla, a Palestinian photographer who was with Imad and who was also shot. The photographs show the armoured vehicle marooned on an empty street. There is no mob. There is not even a person in the photograph..

"The Israelis are lying," Sayeed says. 'Everyone had fled when the tanks came into the centre of Jenin. People were terrified. They left their shops open and their cars on the street and ran. '

"Imad and I were alone on the street when the tank opened fire at us. I told him to be careful of that tank, but he just said, 'This is a good photo'.  Then they shot us."

Sayeed points out that both men were wearing jackets;  his said "Press",  Imad's "TV".

Btselem, an Israeli human rights group that monitors the actions of the IDF with the help of former Israeli soldiers, claims that hundreds of unlawful killings of Palestinians should be investigated. But few actually are.

"The army hardly ever opens investigations into cases of unlawful killing," says Lior Yavne, Btselem's spokesman. "The army is basically conducting a policy of impunity. Soldiers realise they can do anything they want and they will not face problems. They know nobody is monitoring their behaviour."

Yavne points to what he regards as the important difference between now and his time in the army between 1991 and 1995. "Before this intifada every shooting death was investigated. The commanders have now decided we are in an armed conflict short of war, but that means they don't have to open an investigation in case of death."

Even when they do, Yavne claims the investigators - military police - rely on the word of the soldiers who did the shooting and their unit commander.

Forty Palestinians are reported to have been killed since June 20, when tanks rolled into West Bank cities. Btselem says that at least 20 of the dead were unarmed civilians.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), based in New York, has this year listed the West Bank and Gaza as the world's most dangerous places for reporters to work because of Israeli gunfire - all the more so for Palestinian journalists, who lack even the nebulous protection of an international organisation:

The CPJ has taken up Imad's case, but is not optimistic. Sixteen journalists have been wounded by Israeli fire, two of them fatally, since September 2000. "In none of the cases has the IDF taken responsibility," says Ann Cooper, the CPJ's director.

"I don't think there is a deliberate policy to kill journalists, but certainly this year we did see the IDF using major force to keep journalists out of areas where they did not want that story covered - they didn't want eyewitnesses."

The last photograph of Imad, taken by his friend Sayeed, shows him sitting in the street pressing his hand into a huge wound in his right thigh.

His trousers are soaked red, and his grey polo shirt is splattered with blood. His sunglasses hang from his neck and his eyes look way too old for his age. He is quiet, perhaps the first time I saw him not talking.

A number of organisations have called, offering help to his dependants. His family have turned them down, saying their boy would rather have had justice.

A "two-state solution" with Nazi German invasion and colonisation would make as much sense, it becomes increasingly obvious.

But not to the fake-'left', of course.

Here is another variant of Stalinist Revisionism's rotten legacy, still pompously and deceitfully posing as the CPGB (for effect) while having retreated from Leninism and pro-Sovietism more rapidly and further than the most despicable anti-communist Trotskyists who ever joined in imperialism's mind-rotting Cold War brainwashing propaganda.

Their latest ludicrous contribution to philistinism's anti-theory lower depths is to favourably quote some unreformed Palestinian Stalinist Revisionists STILL trying to justify Moscow's 1948 nonsense of agreeing to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine in the first place.

The old Revisionist insane delusion of a 'peacefully tamed' imperialism (Zionism), or a totally 'reformed' capitalist-imperialist system, is dimly discernible through this confused fog of cringing, self-contradictory, opportunist gobshite:

Only in 1982 did the two Palestinian sections reunite to form the Palestinian People's Party. We chose this name to highlight the priority of the national struggle in Palestine today. But there is no doubt: we are communists fighting for a communist world. In 1997 we joined the PLO. We were the first Palestinian organisation that put forward a programme for two states. I think we were quite influential in pushing the PLO towards this position. Ever since 1948 we have been advocating that there are obviously two people with two very distinct cultures. Why should we force them to live together in one state? Of course as a communist I want to live without borders and I am working towards the unification of all peoples. But today Israelis and Palestinians need to live in two different states.

I am hopeful that Israelis and Palestinians will unite into a democratic, secular state one day, but this will need a long, patient process. For the here and now, the slogan of a 'democratic, secular Palestine' is useless. It does not show a way to the future.

Without the Israeli peace movement the Palestinians will never get a democratic state of their own. The Israeli working class needs to fight for the rights of the Palestinians. We need their help and solidarity, just as they need our help. We have to tell our friends in Israel that we do accept their state if they accept ours.

What is your view on the right to return for Palestinians. Does it contradict a programme for two states?

The right to return is very important to us. As a communist I fight for the right of every human being to live where they want to and naturally that includes Palestinians.

This right does not mean that everybody moves back to where their family might have lived many decades ago. Who knows where people want to live? I presume most Palestinians don't want to go to Israel and give up their friends and families. My own village was totally destroyed in 1948. Why would I want to go back there? - But we must fight for this right to return, because it has a very important political meaning. It means Israel has to accept its responsibility for the unjust way in which this state was founded.

Will the tactic of suicide bombing help the Palestinians reach their aims?

We don't agree with this tactic at all. We need strong tactics. Advocating that your own comrades blow themselves up is not a strong thing to do. Also I think we should fight our struggle on our own ground.

The political responsibility for the suicide bombings lies with Ariel Sharon. That is the first thing to understand.

But we must also understand that the suicide bombings are actually undermining the Israeli peace movement. We need all the support we can get - from the world, but mainly from the Israeli people. As long as the suicide bombings go on, Sharon has an excuse to deny us all democratic rights.

What is your relationship with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which advocate and orchestrate the suicide bombings?

This is not so easy to answer. I am a communist, so I strongly criticise Islamic fundamentalism.

On the other hand, the national struggle against the occupation has brought us quite close together. The left in Palestine is unfortunately very weak. A lot of people in Palestine are turning to fundamentalism, because it is the only thing that seems to offer them a little hope. Sharon's politics have led hundreds of thousands of my people into the arms of Hamas. Sharon is helping Hamas, in the same way that Hamas is helping Sharon.

It is the occupation that sometimes brings communists and religious fundamentalists together. But I am convinced that if the Palestinians had their own state, totally new forms of struggle would emerge: the democrats and socialists against the Islamic fundamentalists.

But surely we can't wait? Surely we need to win people away from their leadership in the here and now? Communists would be amongst the first people a fundamentalist regime would want to get rid of.

The occupation has unfortunately blurred the distinction between opposing political groups on the Palestinian side. But of course I agree and we are arguing very strongly against Hamas and Jihad. Only our voices are very weak and Hamas is very loud. 

At every meeting I go to I speak out against this most corrupt form of religion. I used to live in Algiers and have seen what Islamic fundamentalism can do to a whole people. It wants the opposite of all the things that I am fighting for, justice, women's rights, democracy. For example, the PPP is currently campaigning for a 'family law' which would allow the right to divorce and equal rights for men and women. Hamas and Jihad are very much against this. The only way we can win the Palestinian people away from Hamas is by showing them that we have solutions for earth, not just for heaven.

After such a deluded rant of pathetic and philistine evasiveness posing as 'communism', it not only can hardly be marvelled at that the CP (PPP) voice is so "weak" (despite nearly a century's start on Hamas) and that the Islamic Guerrillas' voice is so "strong"; but serious anti-imperialists could even feel pleased that those who are at least willing to fight to regain their homeland from Zionist colonisation and incessant brutalisation and humiliation, are at last gaining ground.

But not the despicable British fake-'left', of course, who thoroughly approve this unbelievably continuing Stalinist Revisionist delusion that 'democracy', and 'justice', and 'feminism' will tame imperialism and totally reform the capitalist-colonialist exploitation system out of all recognition.

And this is the jibber that is supposed to be more "earthly realistic"!! No wonder the Islamics are having it their own way for the moment.

But a resurgence of Marxist-Leninist scientific anti-imperialist revolution is inevitable. EPSR

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

The cold war has not ended

• Roundtable denounces  U.S. attempts to justify aggression against Cuba, with the new pretense that the island poses a threat of informatics warfare, which only the United States has used, in Yugoslavia

• THE new imperialist scheme of accusing Cuba of posing a cybernetic terrorist threat will not detain our will to develop information technology, a commitment that affects not only universities but all levels of education, extending to the most distant territories of the nation.

This slander reveals the enemy's true fear about the possibilities offered to the Cuban people by the Revolution: that of becoming increasingly more cultured and therefore freer.

The premeditated conspiracy of the press, high-level U.S. officials and Miami mafia spokespersons was the subject of the roundtable broadcast by Cuban television and attended by President Fidel Castro Ruz.

Rogelio Polanco, editor-in-chief of Juventud Rebelde newspaper, explained that the absurd story of a possible cybernetic attack began to circulate on February 7, during a hearing of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. He announced that a media campaign was immediately orchestrated, with the fabrication of that phantom and employing terms such as "asymmetrical war," the "potential threat" of disorganizing the U.S. armed forces, and a "potential technological danger."

This is another attempt to discredit Cuba, which has achieved an admirable level of technological development. According to them, we are now an informatics threat, just like in the past we have been categorized as a nuclear threat, a migratory threat, or a biological threat.

Lazaro Barredo commented that this is no more than another maneuver by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to create a pretext for aggression against Cuba, based on the false idea that our country poses a threat. He stressed that the campaign emerged after Fidel's inauguration of the computer center in Pinar del Rio early this year.

Another panelist, Bárbara Betancourt from Radio Havana Cuba, explained that the concept of asymmetric war, proposed by the U.S. media, implies that a country of inferior strength can wage a battle against an industrialized  country. The absurd suggestion is that Cuban security agents are the only ones who operate computers and send e-mail, and are capable of planning cyberterrorism against the United States by introducing computer viruses.

Tubal Páez, president of the Cuban Journalists' Union, characterized the declarations of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as incredibly cynical, trying to make the United States look like a victim threatened by small countries. This is a tactic used often by rich countries to justify abusive actions against the poor, Paez noted.

The concept of cyberwar or informatics warfare, which have emerged in these times of technological development, were explained by informatics security specialist Gonzalo Garcia; who analyzed the potential methods of real attacks against U.S. networks, based on information revealed abroad. According to these sources, the attacks could be carried out from Cuba, or from another country through a Cuban network.

These descriptions by Cuba's enemies of possible direct and indirect attacks are really an attempt to increase tensions between the two countries.

The specialist added that our defense against such possible cyberspace aggressions should be based on prevention.

Barredo recalled the many times that the United States has alleged that Cuba poses a threat to U.S. security. For example, it used as a pretext the construction of the Juraguá nuclear power plant, even though such a danger was disproved repeatedly by our authorities.

He cited how recently declassified documents bring to light multiple variants aimed
at creating a conflict between the two countries, such as using airplanes painted with Cuban insignia, sinking boats full of immigrants in order to blame Cuba and planning acts of provocation and attacks against themselves from the Guantánamo military base.

National defense expert Alcibiades Pérez asked the question of who is making these accusations against Cuba. He then argued that it is very clear that the United States is the main cyberthreat on the planet.

Pérez dismantled the fallacy that the United States is a victim. An article in Time magazine revealed the possibility of infecting those considered enemies with completely modern computer plagues, through the introduction of viruses.

He added that the United States has admitted that it used computer viruses during the war in Yugoslavia. And that is the country that is accusing Cuba of being a danger to its informatics networks.

These new technologies have also been used for U.S. espionage all over the world, explained roundtable moderator Randy Alonso.

Then journalist Bárbara Betancourt discussed the many ways in which these individuals can spy on everything spoken or written through fiber optics. For example, through surveillance systems the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have identified all the participants in the Pinochet case, as well as the leaders of the movement against neoliberal globalization.

Currently, the United States is making the largest investment in the history of espionage: $25 billion USD in 20 years, for the construction of a new generation of spy satellites to replace those currently operating.

Fernando Arrojas, director of the Central Institute of Digital Research (ICID), spoke about Cuba's work in the world of informatics. He categorized the U.S. accusations as shameless and invited anyone to witness the results of the ICID automated systems in sugar refineries, hotels and many other economic and social institutions.

He referred specifically to the medical equipment produced at the center he directs, as well as other scientific entities, noting that this equipment represents an unquestionable contribution to Cuba's public health services. Cuba does not utilize informatics for aggressive ends, in the first place because of the ethics it upholds.

Beatriz Alonso, general director of CITMATEL, explained that Cuban institutions' use of the Internet makes it possible to access information necessary in today's world. There are no Cuban sites offering pornography, terrorist information or other vices which proliferate in some capitalist societies, among which the United States ranks in first place.

Fidel stated that Cuba uses computer technology for its economic and social development, and that the enemy's lies do not intimidate us. On the other hand, they evidence the empire's desperation and frustration at not having been able to destroy the Revolution.

He explained that on February 19 El Nuevo Herald, at the service of the Miami mafia, published an article entitled "Alerta sobre amenaza de ataque cibernético proveniente de Cuba" (Warning on Threat of Cuban Cybernetic Attack). The, article claims that the island is a serious threat to the United States because it has technical facilities that could be used in cybernetic warfare.

Fidel stressed that it had never passed through the Cuban authorities' minds to carry out such an aggression against that superpower. But these lies could be utilized as pretexts to try to destroy the Revolution, because they invent things to try to deceive U.S. public opinion.

Fidel stated that Cuba has a response to this and other crimes and lies, as well as more than enough reason to remain faithful to the slogan "Socialism or Death."