Israeli kidnapped on Lebanese border
Ok, so relax. It’s not true. I mean, if that had really happened, we would know about it, right? It would be all over the 24hr news, analysts would be wondering what it meant for the region, and whoever was responsible for snatching the civilian would be condemned as carrying out a gross provocation. In the event that the Israeli citizen was quickly released, we would all breathe a sigh of relief.
So let’s be glad that nothing like this has happened.
Israel allegedly snatched Rabih Zahra from an area along the Lebanese border with Israel on Sunday.
According to the source, Zahra’s arrest represents a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon…
A joint Lebanese army and UN team inspected the area from which Zahra was taken and announced he was arrested on Lebanese territory.
Zahra claimed that Israeli soldiers had beaten him and asked him about the activities of the Lebanese Shiite Movement, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon.
A Eurocentric Problem
M. Shahid Alam
He who knows himself and others
Here will also see,
That the East and West, like brothers,
Parted ne’er shall be.
Goethe[1]
In no other major civilization do self-regard, self-congratulation and denigration of the ‘Other’ run as deep, nor have these tendencies infected as many aspects of their thinking, laws, and policy, as they have in Western Europe and its overseas extensions.[2] These tendencies reached their apogee during the nineteenth century, retreated briefly after World War II, but have been staging a come back since the end of the Cold War.
For several decades now, critics have studied these Western tendencies under the rubric of Eurocentrism, a complex of ideas, attitudes, and policies, which treat Europe – when it is convenient – as a geographical, racial and cultural unity, but places Western Europe and its overseas extensions at the center of world history since 1000 CE.[3]
Unlike the garden variety of ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism emerged as an ideological project – shaped by Europe’s intellectual elites – in the service of Europe’s rising expansionist, starting in the sixteenth century. It makes sweeping claims of European superiority in all spheres of civilization. In this worldview, only Europeans have created history over the past three thousand years, beginning with the ancient Greeks. In various accounts, this centrality is ascribed to race, culture, religion and geography.
Fisk and the Scrivener
Robert Fisk
When the New York Times’s Ethan Bronner reviewed The Great War for Civilization, after briefly acknowledging the author’s ‘rare combination of scholarly knowledge, experience and drive’, he denounced Robert Fisk for having become ’something of a caricature of himself, railing against Israel and the United States, dismissing the work of most of his colleagues as cowering and dishonest, and seeking to expose the West’s self-satisfied hypocrisy nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism.’ One can understand Bronner’s rage considering that the journalistic failures of the New York Times are the frequent targets of Fisk’s pointed barbs. Predictably, then, the Israel lobby amanuensis — who for some reason failed to disclose his son’s service in the Israeli army — that is, until our friends at the Electronic Intifada forced him to divulge the conflict of interest — reaches for the lobby’s time tested weapon for shooting messengers: the smear.
First, Bronner declares that Fisk is ‘most passionate and least informed about Israel’ based on the fact that he accurately reported that Israel’s offer to the Palestinians at Camp David in 2000 actually amounted to 64 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, and because he describes Israel’s occupation as a ‘Colonial War’. Fisk compounds his crimes when he ‘approvingly quotes the left-wing Israeli journalist Amira Hass’ as saying that a journalist’s job is ‘to monitor power and the centers of power.’
Support the SAIA Carleton Divestment Campaign
While the Stephen Harper led Canadian government shamefully panders to Israel, concerned Canadian students at Carleton University in Ottawa are backing up their devotion to peace and social justice with action. Here’s a link to their campaign divestment report.
You can learn more about how you can support the Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) Carleton Divestment Campaign and find related links and resources by clicking here.
Cubans attempt to resolve Venezuelan electricity shortage despite living in constant blackout
Caracas streetlamp inviting citizens to report malfunctions may soon invite them to purchase a flashlight, instead. (Photo by Belén Fernández)
The latest complaint among the Venezuelan opposition to President Hugo Chávez revolves around his decision to bring Cuban Minister of Information Technology and Communications Ramiro Valdés to Venezuela to help rectify the current electrical crisis, intensified by diminishing water levels at the country’s primary hydroelectric dam. According to a front-page warning in a recent edition of Venezuelan opposition daily El Nacional, “electrical experts and Cubans in exile” have come to the conclusion that Valdés does not possess the requisite skills to evaluate electrical crises and that his expertise is instead in internet censorship; no conclusion is offered as to how Cubans in exile spontaneously acquire expertise in whatever subject is currently being used to discredit the Castro regime.
A gentleman I spoke with at the February 4 opposition march at Plaza Brión de Chacaíto in Caracas had a different perception of Valdés’ qualifications and informed me that the minister’s only expertise was in assassinations, honed during the Cuban Revolution. As for more recent examples of political changes of direction that had involved assassinations, the gentleman qualified last summer’s coup in Honduras as magnífico and entirely democratic; he stressed that these labels did not apply to the thwarted coup of February 4, 1992, the anniversary of which was being celebrated at the pro-Chávez rally nearby—with superior levels of attendance, music, and the color red.
Ethan Bronner’s Conflict With Impartiality
by Alison Weir
Ethan Bronner, New York Times Jerusalem Bureau chief
Ethan Bronner is the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief. As such, he is the editor responsible for all the news coming out of Israel-Palestine. It is his job to decide what gets reported and what doesn’t; what goes in a story and what gets cut.
To a considerable degree, he determines what readers of arguably the nation’s most influential newspaper learn about Israel and its adversaries, and, especially, what they don’t.
His son just joined the Israeli army.
According to New York Times ethics guidelines, such a situation would be expected to cause significant concern. In these guidelines the Timesrepeatedly emphasizes the importance of impartiality.
This is considered so critical that the Times devotes considerable attention to “conflict of interest” (also called “conflict with impartiality”) problems, situations in which personal interest might cause a journalist to intentionally or unconsciously slant a story.
Is One Iraqi’s Self-Hatred Newsworthy?
Crusaders in Iraq?
M. Shahid Alam
An Arab-American of Lebanese descent, fluent in Arabic, Anthony Shadid was one of a handful of unembedded Western journalists reporting from Iraq during the US invasion in 2003. At the time, he was The Washington Post’s correspondent for Islamic Affairs in the Middle East.
His dispatches from Iraq were about Iraqis, about the destruction visited upon them by a war whose architects claimed that they were bringing democracy to that country. He reported the destruction and mayhem caused by this war by letting the Iraqis speak for themselves: and they spoke of their pain, their anguish, their perplexity and their anger.
For his honest reporting, for a job well done, Anthony Shadid received some of the highest accolades of his profession. In 2004 he received the Michael Kelly Award and the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Other honors followed, all well-deserved. He had won his spurs for reporting, not cheerleading, neither praising nor denouncing the United States. He was reporting for The Washington Post, a neoconservative newspaper.
On Jan 29, I noticed for the first time a report in The New York Times that carried Anthony Shadid’s byline. Was this a promotion? It was written from Halaichiya, a remote village in the southern tip of Iraq, untouched by the war. The village has never seen Americans before, neither troops nor diplomats.
America’s new right: Racist and proud of it
When I read The Washington Post’s report on the opening of the far-right wing’s Tea Party convention in Nashville, I was taken aback by the remarks of former Republican Congressman and white nationalist Tom Tancredo. While racism undeniably persists in driving a good deal of the American political agenda, the degree to which Tancredo and his ilk in the increasingly mainstream right-wing can be overt and blatant in their bigotry is remarkable and worrying. Here’s what I mean:
On Thursday night, giving the opening address, former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination as an anti-immigration candidate, railed against Obama and “the cult of multiculturalism.” Americans could be “boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state,” he said. “People who couldn’t even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”
When Tancredo said, “His name is Barack Hussein Obama,” the audience booed loudly.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recaps:
Canada’s pandering to Israel
By Ian Williams (MEI)
In January, Canada stopped contributing to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It is the latest in a series of decisions that have seen Ottawa ‘out-Israeling’ Washington. It had previously stopped funding KAIROS (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives), an NGO that had been supporting human rights groups in Israel and the Occupied Territories. In each case, the government of Stephen Harper seemed to be responding to, or rather pandering to, rabidly pro-Israeli Jewish groups in Canada. Israel itself has certainly never encouraged an end to the funding of UNRWA, an institution that for decades has, in effect, been paying some of the bills for the occupation.
Although camouflaged internationally by a similar drift in British and Australian policy, Ottawa has moved far from its own earlier positions, and possibly farther than either London or Canberra. Indeed, the Obama administration’s muted criticisms of Israeli policy sound relatively ferocious compared with Canada’s gestures towards the administration of Binyamin Netanyahu.
Once upon a time, Canada was a paragon of international virtue: supportive of the UN and happily putting distance between itself and its southern neighbour on the Middle East. Then came Stephen Harper. Ottawa did not join the Iraq war, but that was more a function of strong Canadian public opinion and Harper’s parlous electoral position than any considered choice.
