Protests erupt across the UK; BBC offices picketed in Manchester
May 31st, 2010 § 8 Comments
Protest outside the Manchester offices of the BBC (Photo: Jairo Lugo)
UPDATE: a standoff outside the BBC offices below:
Media scholar Jairo Lugo is in Manchester reporting for PULSE from a demo in front of the BBC offices. According to police estimates there are a thousand people gathered outside. Many are carrying Turkish and Palestinian flags and placards bearing messages of solidarity with the activist on the Freedom Flotilla. They are calling on the BBC to stop the whitewash and report accurately on the massacre.
According to the Police similar protests are taking place in London, Cardiff, Birmingham, and Glasgow among other places in the UK.
Activists are confronting the police at the front doors of the BBC. Anger and disgust all around. BBC is serving as an Israeli propagand organ. Jairo Lugo reports:
BBC’s website now carries a report on the protest.
Freedom Flotilla and the BBC’s Shame
May 31st, 2010 § 7 Comments
by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
UPDATE: See Jairo Lugo’s report on the protests outside the BBC offices in Manchester and elsewhere here. Also, check out these excellent articles by Robert Fisk and Glenn Greenwald, and the Guardian’s report on the world renowned figures who are aboard the ship.
The BBC proves its despicable subservience to the Israeli propaganda machine once again. Before it was shamed by Al Jazeera and others into covering the Freedom Flotilla massacre, it reported the story as a mere claim by Hamas. Here is how it first appeared on the BBC’s website:
BBC News – Israel intercepts Gaza flotilla, says Hamas
The Palestinian movement Hamas says the Israeli navy has intercepted a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip.
The massacre soon became the top news story on Google News and Twitter. The BBC could no longer maintain the pretence of ignorance. It finally reported on the massacre as a matter of fact, but appended this line: “Hamas, a militant palestinian group that controls the Gaza strip, has fired thousands of rockets into Israel over the past decade.”
The victims weren’t innocent, you see. They were on their way to aid these terrible people who fire ‘thousands of rockets into Israel’. That’s all you need to know. And if you mention those hundreds of thousands of bombs, missiles and rockets that Israel has shot into Gaza…Why, you must be an anti-Semite!
Watch Israeli Forces Attack Activists on board Mavi Marmara
May 31st, 2010 § 6 Comments
Israeli spokesman Mark Regev just told Al Jazeera that the Israeli forces who killed more than 10 passengers aboard the Turkish humanitarian aid convoy the Mavi Marmara were merely responding to an attack “initiated” by passengers. Regev claims the passengers were armed with knives and clubs. The surviving activists argue that they were unarmed and that the boat was only stocked with humanitarian aid for Gaza. Remember, the activists were in international waters, and they even raised a white flag after some passengers were shot.
One important question that was brought to Regev by the Al Jazeera interviewer: if the Israeli forces were merely ordered to tow the boat in, why were they armed with real and not rubber bullets?
Watch the chaos for yourself below. Warning, disturbing images.
International activists cause their own deaths by attacking nonconfrontational Israeli commandos
May 31st, 2010 § 13 Comments
IDF spokeswoman Avital Liebovitch.
At a press briefing this morning following the massacre by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commandos of passengers on board the Mavi Marmara, one of the boats pertaining to the Freedom Flotilla attempting to break the siege of Gaza, IDF spokeswoman Avital Liebovitch claimed that the passengers had engaged in “severe violence against our soldiers.”
According to Liebovitch, the violence was premeditated and was administered via live fire, sharp items such as knives, and weapons “grabbed” from the IDF commandos. While underscoring Israel’s unique ability to portray its armed forces as victims, the analysis failed to provide a compelling reason for why—if the alleged attack using grabbed weapons was indeed premeditated—the IDF did not throw a wrench in the works by simply refraining from raiding the ship.
Israelis massacre activists on aid flotilla
May 31st, 2010 § 1 Comment
Scenes from the massacre:
UPDATE I, II, III, IV and V on the BBC’s despicable coverage below.
Al Jazeera International, 30 May 2010 — A deadly attack has taken place off the coast of Gaza – as Israeli forces stormed at least one ship – attempting to break the blockade of Gaza. Commandos lowered themselves from helicopters and onto the Mavi Marmara – the lead ship in a flotilla of six vessels which are carrying aid for the Palestinian territory…Israeli radio is reporting the death toll may be as high as 16 people. Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal onboard the ship sent this report before communications were cut
According to multiple reports the death toll now stands at 16, with over 60 injured. You can follow Al Jazeera International and Press TV‘s excellent live coverage. You can also follow the flotilla’s Twitter feed.
Mustafa Barghouti on Al Jazeera rightly notes that this constitutes an act of war against multiple countries. The ship was in international waters carrying the flags of several countries. This is a flagrant violation of international law.
Guantánamo “Suicides” more like Homicide
May 30th, 2010 § 1 Comment
This March Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Scott Horton published a scathing investigative report on the alleged “suicide” of 3 Guantánamo Bay prisoners in 2006. Based on Horton’s findings which were compiled with the help of US soldier eyewitness accounts, it’s much more likely that the men died while they were being tortured. Horton suggests that the rags the prisoners supposedly used to choke themselves with were more likely to have been inserted by their interrogators (possibly to muffle their screams) which then led to asphyxiation.
In addition to the disturbing sequence of events and scenes described in his written report (especially the part about the type of torture that inflicts extreme pain without leaving marks), Horton reveals that the men were probably also innocent, and even worse, about to be set free.
On May 28 Horton appeared on Fox New’s Freedom Watch where he was allowed to briefly discuss his article. Find Horton’s entire in-depth report for Harper’s here.
BBC Reports on Gaza Freedom Flotilla
May 30th, 2010 § 1 Comment
A boat dedicated to American ISM activist Rachel Corrie who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 while protesting against the demolition of a Palestinian home.
Whether or not the boats of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla arrive safely in Gaza, they will have at least achieved the difficult feat of catching the attention of the mainstream press, something which every activist action for Gaza should be aimed at. Jon Donnison of the BBC reported on the boats yesterday and followed up with another report today. It’s obvious that the content of the second report has been influenced by higher-ups who were likely angered by the low amount of bias Donnison showed towards Israel yesterday, but at least there is a second report. In the clip below Donnison even counters another BBC commentator’s argument that the aid isn’t necessary by adding that despite Israel’s claims, the United Nations reports that Gaza is getting less than a quarter of what it actually needs for normal survival standards.
The idea that everything is okay, just fine in Gaza, is simply not true. It’s not uncommon to see young people sifting through rubble to try and recycle bits of old concrete, such is the shortage of construction materials to allow people to rebuild.
Is Donnison’s reporting perfect? The answer is no, but he is operating within an extremely confined power structure and he and other mainstream reporters and outlets need evidence that viewers want increased, accurate reporting on Gaza and elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territories. For now, Israeli spin doctors are trying to write off this activist action as a political ploy or security threat, but anyone with eyes can assess the reality of the situation for themselves, and the uninformed public often requires a mainstream lens to do that with.
Violent Logic: A Review of M. Shahid Alam’s Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism
May 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
People have been against both the idea and practice of Zionism since its inception. Zionism is an ideology that has never earned the support of all Jews, and one that has never been accepted by the vast majority of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. Zionism has likewise failed to achieve significant support in the so-called Third World, and has been almost uniformly rejected by black nationalists inside the United States. Yet Zionism has been successful insofar as its desire to create a Jewish-majority nation-state has been achieved. Despite its discursive self-image as a liberation movement, Zionist practice is colonialist and brutally violent.
In his latest book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan), M. Shahid Alam explores these paradoxes with great skill and insight. Israeli Exceptionalism takes its place among a series of recent books that question the logic of Zionism. Most of these books argue in favor of a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict; inherent in that argument is a rejection of Zionism. Alam takes a slightly different approach in his rejection of Zionism, one that is global in scope. He points out that “[a]s an exclusionary settler colony, Israel does not stand alone in the history of European expansion overseas, but it is the only one of its kind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (14). Israel, in other words, is an anomaly: a settler colonial society still in thrall of the ideologies and racism of the nineteenth century. As with the European colonization of North America, Zionism conceptualizes itself as an exceptional force of good in history.
Nuclear weapons permissible on Iranian soil as long as they belong to Russia or China
May 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Lula and Erdoğan conspire to increase political executions in Iran.
FETHIYE, TURKEY—Arriving to a Turkish friend’s house in the middle of last evening’s public television newscast, I was given a recap of national accomplishments reported thus far. According to Mehmet these included:
- Turkish qualification to the final round of the Eurovision Song Contest.
- Turkish emancipation of the Gaza Strip.
- Turkish defiance of U.S. attempts to monopolize the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The premature claim of Gazan emancipation was, it turned out, a result of Mehmet’s misinterpretation of news footage of a port scene comprising the Mavi Marmara, a critical Turkish component of the Freedom Flotilla currently attempting to break the siege of Gaza. The timeline was rectified when Mehmet accepted that Gaza would presumably not be in such dire need of help if it resembled the Turkish port of Antalya, and that the Turkish flag was perhaps not the predominant feature of the contemporary Gazan landscape.
Israel’s Latest Gaza PR Offensive
May 28th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
While hundreds of human rights activists from around the world await the opportunity to bring aid and supplies to besieged Gaza, Israeli forces are preparing to detain, imprison and deport them.
Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros has been providing exemplary reporting on Gaza since before Israel’s brutal Winter assault which took the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians in less than one month and doesn’t hold back in the clip below when confronting Col. Moshe Levi at a recent impromptu press conference aimed at explaining why there “is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
For live and recent clips from Gaza Flotilla participants, click here.
To find out how you can support the Gaza Flotilla and for up to date news, click here.
