Palestinian Prisoners and their Names for a Change
June 27th, 2009 § 6 Comments
A Palestinian boy looks at pictures compiled by family members of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails. How will this knowledge influence him as he becomes a man? (AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill)
In 1987 the United Nations General Assembly marked June 26th as International Day in Support of Torture Victims. According to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan:
This is a day on which we pay our respects to those who have endured the unimaginable. This is an occasion for the world to speak up against the unspeakable. It is long overdue that a day be dedicated to remembering and supporting the many victims and survivors of torture around the world.
His words may have been nicely phrased, but they provide little comfort to those who continue to be tortured in prisons and detention halls (legal and illegal) located all over the world. Writing about it won’t provide them with any comfort either, but one can only hope that reading this may move you, dear reader, to take actions in solidarity with torture victims from the past, the present, and to work to prevent more from existing in the future.
Iran, Ciphers and Social Facts
June 27th, 2009 § 3 Comments
A gathering of Ahmadinejad supporters in Tehran
Max Ajl offers a sobering corrective to the hype and nonsense that surround the discussions over the recent Iranian elections. Editorially, we don’t quite share the writer’s appraisal that Mousavi is an ‘execrable figure, by all accounts’ — that may be the view of some such as As’ad Abu Khalil but we recognize that this view by no means speaks for all.
Reading liberal and left-wing commentary on what’s going on in Iran, I’ve been rather shocked. Everyone–including this writer–transforms into a savagely incisive Iran scholar equipped to pontificate on Iranian society, its domestic political institutions, the velayat-e faqih, the social composition of Ahmadinejad supporters and Mousavi supporters, etc. etc., enlightened by studious Twitter research, perusal of YouTube videos, a glance at Juan Cole’s blog, and for the extremely careful, a quick read through the last 50 pages of A People Interrupted.
Voices of Dissent – Abbas Barzegar
June 26th, 2009 § 2 Comments
A female supporter of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad displays her hand painted with the Iranian flag, also used as a sign for his party (Photo: AP)
Media fantasies in Iran – Abbas Barzegar
It was only a matter of time before revolution in Iran, believed dissidents and media in the west. They were wrong
It’s not about the election, Ahmadinejad, or the even the protesters. The world has been captivated by the events in Iran because for many, Iran is to Islamism what the Soviet Union was to communism and presumably today we are somewhere near the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Revolution is Commodified?
June 26th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Now everyone can show their solidarity with Iranian protestors by buying t-shirts, bumper stickers, aprons, teddy bears and much, much more!!!
T-shirts
Mohammed Omer correcting the record
June 26th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Mohammed Omer, the great Palestinian journalist and recipient of the Martha Gelhorn prize, sets the record straight about the torture ordeal he suffered at the hands of the Israeli Shin Beth torturers.
June 26, 2008 is a day I will never forget. For the events of that day irrevocably changed my life. That day I was detained, interrogated, strip searched, and tortured while attempting to return home from a European speaking tour, which culminated in independent American journalist Dahr Jamil and I sharing the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize in London — an award given to journalists who expose propaganda which often masks egregious human rights abuses.
Mohammed Omer receiving the Martha Gelhorn Prize together with Dahr Jamail
I want to address the denials from Israel and the inaccurate reporting by a few journalists in addition to requesting state of Israel to acknowledge what it did to me, prosecute the members of the Shin Bet responsible for it and put in place procedures that protect other journalists from such treatment.
Since 2003, I’ve been the voice to the voiceless in the besieged Gaza Strip for a number of publications and news programs ranging from The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs to the BBC and, Morgenbladet in Norway as well as Democracy Now! These stories exposed a carefully-crafted fiction continuing control and exploitation of five-million people. Their impact, coupled with the reporting of others served to change public opinion in the United States and Europe concerning the dynamics of Israel and its occupation of Palestine .
After receiving the Martha Gellhorn prize I returned home through the Allenby Bridge Crossing in the Occupied West Bank between Jordan and Israel. It was here I was detained, interrogated, and tortured for several hours by Shin Bet and border officers. When it appeared I may be close to death an ambulance was called to transport me to a hospital. From that day my life has been a year of continued medical treatments, pain — and a search for justice.
The article can be read in its entirety here
Fantasising Israel
June 26th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Israel's militarized liberalism
How can the supposed liberalism of Tel Aviv coexist with apartheid and occupation? In this excellent essay Yonatan Mendel considers the Israeli “fantasising project.” “It is the “positive, ‘normal’ and likeable characteristics of Tel Aviv,” Mendel argues, ”that make it a paradigm of the moral and political blindness of Israeli society.”
At this very moment, long queues are probably forming outside Tel Aviv’s latest culinary thing: the yoghurterias. Even in the middle of the night you have to wait in line to get a cold and refreshing ice-cream yoghurt from the busy shop on Rothschild Boulevard. Springing up like mushrooms after the rain, the ice-cream parlours have allowed the ‘white city’ of Tel Aviv to experience the white revolution of the yoghurt. It is sweet and sour, made of natural ingredients, both healthy and tasty, with only 1.6 per cent fat, and topped with pieces of fresh fruit freshly cut up. Mangoes and pineapples, kiwis, strawberries, pomegranates, dates, melons and watermelons, red, yellow and green, are generously placed on top of the thick white yoghurt. A small cup of the local delicacy costs 18 shekels (about £3), a medium-size cup is 21 shekels, and a huge cup is 27 shekels. This is the best gastronomic response to the humidity that prevails in Israel’s ‘first Hebrew city’.
You can read the rest here.
Take this with you
June 26th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Prayer at Night – Erich Fried
Where injustice speaks with the voices
of justice and of power
where injustice speaks with the voices
of benevolence and of reason
where injustice speaks with the voices
of moderation and of experience
help us not to become bitter
And if we do despair
help us to see that we are desperate
and if we do become bitter
help us to see that we are becoming bitter
and if we shrink with fear
help us to know that it is fear
despair and bitterness and fear
So that we do not fall
into the error
of thinking
we have had a new revelation
and found the great way out
or the way in
and that alone had changed us.
*Erich Fried was a Jewish-Austrian poet whose father was murdered by the Gestapo following the Anschluss with Nazi Germany. He has another poem called “A Jew to Zionist Fighters” and you can find one translation of it here.
Holy Land Grab
June 26th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
A Palestinian family sitting by the remains of their home in East Jerusalem.
In a must-see two part documentary found below Jacky Rowland of Al Jazeera takes us on an important journey through Jerusalem where she interviews everyone from Zionist fundamentalists, settlers and pro-peace activists, to Palestinian shopkeepers, Israeli-conspirators and regular residents. Rowland attempts to reveal some of the most disturbing elements of the Israeli government’s ongoing efforts to restructure the city into Israel’s “eternal, undivided capital” at the expense of all its non-Zionist residents.
At 6:12 of Part I we watch as a settler tries to intimidate an old Palestinian woman by openly telling her that she and her and her family are also going to be forced from their land through the same demolitions and forced evictions that succeeded in getting rid of her neighbors.
Iran: Influence or Threat
June 26th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Al Jazeera’s Empire, with Marwan Bishara. The first short documentary is so bad that it could have been made by the BBC or CNN. Flynt Leverett is insightful as usual, but as much as I love and respect Hamid Dabashi, I think he adds little of value to the discussion.
Michael Jackson, R.I.P
June 26th, 2009 § 2 Comments
He cared about them, and we all care about him. R.I.P brother.
Tell me what has become of my rights
Am I invisible because you ignore me?
Your proclamation promised me free liberty, now
I’m tired of bein’ the victim of shame…
I can’t believe this is the land from which I came
You know I do really hate to say it
The government don’t wanna see
But if Martin Luther was livin’
He wouldn’t let this be, no, no
