Jimmy Carter: ‘Peace is possible’ in Holy Land
January 27th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In his new book “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” former President Jimmy Carter explains the controversy over his previous book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and offers a plan for attaining peace in the Middle East. An excerpt significant for Carter reinforcing that Hamas adhered to the ceasefire, and that peace is not possible without Hamas’s involvement. Full Interview on MSNBC Today (Thanks to Annie).
Emperor Obama
January 27th, 2009 § 5 Comments
Obama is certainly a good diplomat. He’s given an interview to a fawning journalist from the Saudi-owned Arabiyah channel (as opposed to the more credible Jazeera) in which he talks nice. Examine his words, however, and you see that the basic parameters have not budged an inch. ‘Israel’s security’ remains paramount; Hamas and Hizbullah are implicitly labelled terrorist (Iran supports terrorist organisations); the liberation of Palestine is reduced to an issue of economic development. On the ground, meanwhile, Obama’s first week was marked by the imperial murder of tens of civilians in Pakistan. Richard Seymour provides an excellent analysis here:
The first Democratic president in the modern era to be elected on an anti-war ticket is also, to the relief of neocons and the liberal belligerati, a hawk. Committed to escalation in Afghanistan, his foreign policy selections also indicate bellicosity towards Sudan and Iran. During his first week in office he sanctioned two missile attacks in Pakistan, killing 22 people, including women and children. And his stance on Gaza is remarkably close to that of the outgoing administration. The question now is how Obama will convince his supporters to back that stance. Bush could rely on a core constituency whose commitment to peace and human rights is, at the very least, questionable. Obama has no such luxury. In making his case, he will need the support of those “liberal hawks” who gave Bush such vocal support.
Israel burns Palestinians alive with illegal White Phosphorus
January 27th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The times they are a-changing. This is CNN! (via Iffit and NKUSA)
The Islamic University of Gaza
January 27th, 2009 § 24 Comments
Further BBC Collaboration
January 27th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In the aftermath of one of the most appalling massacres perpetrated by Zionism against the Palestinian people, the BBC’s ‘Doha Debates‘ arranged discussion of the resolution ”This House believes that political Islam is a threat to the West“. The Palestinian people, of course, at this stage in their six-decade-old struggle against ethnic cleansing and apartheid, happen to have voted for an Islamist party. The Doha Debates are broadcast on the BBC’s international service throughout the Middle East. The Canadian Voice of Palestine have written this open letter:
January 25, 2009:
After the devastation in Gaza that lasted over three weeks, you decided to put to your scripted House, who had no qualms in attending your debate while the BBC refuses to broadcast a humanitarian appeal to Gaza, the following resolution: “This House believes that political Islam is a threat to the West.”
This choice of wording is extremely suspect and contributes nothing to informed debate; in fact, it looks like a page from the Israeli propaganda machine (Hasbara). It hijacks the agenda and diverts the attention from fresh Israeli atrocities, while putting the blame on the shoulders of the victim by opening the door to debate whether Hamas as a political Islamic movement (and the Palestinian people it represents) is a threat to the “West.”
« Read the rest of this entry »
With Gaza, Journalists Fail Again
January 26th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
A rainbow, as if projected by the American media, is seen over the northern Gaza Strip, from the Israel-Gaza Border. (AP Photo / Sebastian Scheiner)
‘The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel’s callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press,’ writes Chris Hedges
The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel’s callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press. There were no major newspapers, television networks or radio stations that challenged Israel’s fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza attack or the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable. Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a product to sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we become little more than propagandists and advertisers. By refusing to expose lies we destroy, in the end, ourselves.
All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. Israel waged an effective war of black propaganda. It lied craftily with its glib, well-rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign press in Gaza and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its own soldiers lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It was the Arabic network al-Jazeera, along with a handful of local reporters in Gaza, which upheld the honor of our trade, that of giving a voice to those who without our presence would have no voice, that of countering the amplified lies of the powerful with the faint cries and pain of the oppressed. But these examples of journalistic integrity were too few and barely heard by us.
Obama’s Vietnam?
January 26th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
‘Friday’s airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan,’ writes Juan Cole. ‘But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war’. Like most western commentators Cole reproduces uncritically claims about the deaths of ‘foreign fighters’ (unconfirmed, for the record). Pakistani officials are usually just as eager to conjure up foreign fighters in order to mitigate the backlash that the extrajudicial murder of innocent tribals would elicit.
On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters. Many of Obama’s initiatives in his first few days in office — preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo — were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with “President Bush” substituted for “President Obama.” Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor’s halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama’s first military operation tell us about his administration’s priorities?
BBC’s Mark Thompson Soft on Israel?
January 26th, 2009 § 5 Comments
In 2005 the Independent reported speculation in the Israeli press that BBC director general Mark Thompson intended to build bridges with the Israeli political class. This could help to explain Thompsons position on aid to Gaza, after all, they’ve broadcast appeals for victims of other conflicts without worry about impartiality. Could Marks personal interest be what makes this one special?
BBC chief defends Gaza decision (11:59) | MP3
The BBC is often accused of an anti-Israeli bias in its coverage of the Middle East, and recently censured reporter Barbara Plett for saying she “started to cry” when Yasser Arafat left Palestine shortly before his death.
Fascinating, then, to learn that its director general, Mark Thompson, has recently returned from Jerusalem, where he held a face-to-face meeting with the hardine Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Although the diplomatic visit was not publicised on these shores, it has been seized upon in Israel as evidence that Thompson, who took office in 2004, intends to build bridges with the country’s political class.
At the heart of BBC row, the homeless of Gaza
January 26th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Safaa Salam, 10, with her brother Salman Salam in the ruins of their family home in the Jabal Rayas area of eastern Gaza.
Peter Beaumont reports from Jabal Rayas, describing the plight of the children of Gaza, whose fate has been, perhaps irredeemably, compromised by the BBC management’s spineless decision not be broadcast the humanitarian appeal.
Safaa Salam is scared and cold. Last night the 10-year-old girl slept in the ruins of her family house in the Jabal Rayas area of eastern Gaza. So did her four-year-old niece Ghavad. It is not so much a ruin as a cave, the top a tented slab of crumbling concrete, cracked and buckling in the middle.
58 Massacres before 1999
January 26th, 2009 § 1 Comment
You can hear people saying “Israel’s gone too far this time.” But it isn’t only this time. Large scale massacres have been a central part of Zionist strategy from the start. Here is some information on the preceding massacres. Unfortunately the list stops in 1999, so many recent massacres, including Qana 2 and Jenin, are not included:
Although the Image that Israel distributes about herself is that of an oppressed nation, it is with heavy hearts that we present these crimes that stand for themselves for the brutality of the Israeli Army and the heartlessness of its soldiers who seem to have a thirst for blood. It is for the hope that the world may see a clearer picture that we present these painful facts. It is interesting to notice that today’s media does not dwell on these crimes as they do on the Holocaust. They are reported in the news for a week or two and then swept into the sea of oblivion. Those who attempt to revive the true history of Israel are charged of being anti-Semitic. So with the hope to keep those memories in mind we present this shameful history of Israel that seems to have found that the role of Goliath is more interesting than that of David.
