London Review of Books in the Israel Lobby’s crosshairs
November 24th, 2010 § 4 Comments
If I had to rank the world’s best publications, I would put the London Review of Books on top. Unlike its progenitor, the NY Review of Books, it is edgier, more daring in its politics. It also has a generally-superior stable of writers. The late Edward Said was a frequent contributor, so is my friend Tariq Ali. Its Israel-Palestine beat is covered by critical voices like Rashid Khalidi, Yitzhak Laor, Ilan Pappe, Neve Gordon, Uri Avnery, Charles Glass, Henry Siegman, Alastair Crooke, Avi Shlaim, Sara Roy, Raja Shehadeh et al — writers you’ll never see in the NYRB or the New Yorker. And of course, in 2006 it did what no American publication dared do: it gave a platform to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
Unsurprisingly, it has been the target of the lobby’s wrath ever since. Earlier this year the neoconservative Standpoint magazine launched a campaign to have its (negligible) public funding revoked. It also smeared LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers. Now comes another salvo. Just Journalism — the UK counterpart to CAMERA — has published a ‘study’, now being publicized by the ADL, which claims to prove LRB’s anti-Israel bias (an allegation that has less sting in the UK than it does in the US). Just Journalism first tried to mask its Israel lobby origins by appointing the Egyptian-born Adel Darwish as its director. However, Darwish only lasted a few months, announcing his resignation in a rambling, semi-coherent post in which he warned that the overzealousness of the organization’s principals risked turning it into ‘a Maccarthist [sic] which-hunt of fellow journalists’. He also noted:
A musical blast from the past
November 23rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
H/t to The Nation’s Greg Mitchell for finding this rare gem and posting it on Twitter.
This is from John Lennon’s documentary “Gimme Some Truth.” It features a young Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn, Regis Debray, and the legendary Miles Davis … shooting hoops with Lennon. Classic.
Onward!
Facebook joins Israeli arsenal
November 23rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Hint to Israelis seeking to avoid military service: Don't update your profile on the Sabbath.
Following this year’s Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara transporting humanitarian aid to Gaza, I wrote the following in an article:
[The incident] may provide inspiration for the scriptwriters of the popular Turkish television series ‘Kurtlar Vadisi’, which prompted a diplomatic skirmish with Israel in January [2010] by portraying Israeli intelligence agents in a negative light. Following the portrayal, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister [Danny] Ayalon subjected the Turkish ambassador to Israel, Oğuz Çelikkol, to humiliating treatment such as being seated in a chair at the Foreign Ministry that was lower to the ground than those sat upon by his Israeli interlocutors. Israel was subsequently forced to apologize for its behavior.
Depending on how the current diplomatic crisis plays out, we may either see more Israeli apologies or new seating arrangements for Çelikkol at the Foreign Ministry, such as a hole in the ground.”
Sure enough, the Turkish film Kurtlar Vadisi: Filistin—”Valley of the Wolves: Palestine“—is slated for release in January 2011. To my knowledge, no holes have yet been dug in Jerusalem to accommodate Turkish diplomatic personnel, although Israel has once again made Turkish news by denying a visa to Turkish citizen Vahap Fırat, reportedly because he is friends on Facebook with the wife of the film’s screenwriter.
Free Press in the US
November 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
An RT crew was detained in the US as they filmed a peace-advocating rally near the ‘School of Assassins,’ aka the School of the Americas, which continues to be funded by American tax dollars.
From Pinochet’s soldiers in Chile, D’Aubuisson’s death squads in El Salvador, Banzer’s minions in Bolivia, Galtieri’s operatives in Argentina and Rios Montt’s soldiers in Guatemala to the present-day generals responsible for the coup in Honduras and the drug war killings in Colombia, the School of the Americas has a dark legacy. Renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the school has graduated 65,000 soldiers from 18 countries.
A cameraman and a correspondent were taken into custody along with a number of activists. The RT crew has now been released. Learn more about the SOA (renamed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) and the reasons for the rally here. More background info after the jump.
The right to roam
November 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Al Jazeera — Unwanted, marginalised and defiant – the Roma people have become the target of governments across Europe.
On Songs of Blood and Sword
November 21st, 2010 § 2 Comments
by Saffi Ullah Ahmad
In her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir, journalist Fatima Bhutto — better known as the niece of the late Benazir Bhutto — takes us through the dark history of one of the world’s best known political dynasties.
Fatima’s grandfather, founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Zuliqar Ali Bhutto, was sent to the gallows (1979) following a military coup orchestrated by General Zia Ul-Haq based on what were concocted charges, despite appeals for mercy from across the diplomatic world. As Henry Kissinger had ominously threatened some years earlier, a ‘horrible example’ was made of Mr. Bhutto. As the book’s cover informs us, in the years since Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s execution, all but one of his children have died; in circumstances mired in mystery, Shahnawaz Bhutto was poisoned in his flat in France (1985), Mir Murtaza Bhutto – Fatima’s father – was gunned down outside his home in Karachi (1996) and Benazir Bhutto was killed following a suicide attack in the garrison city, Rawalpindi (2007).
Above all, Songs of Blood and Sword is the tale of a grieving daughter’s frantic six year search for the truth surrounding her father’s life and death. Fatima describes a kind spirited and idealistic Murtaza, a man of the people, who had idolised Che Guevara in his youth, fittingly having adorned his bedroom walls with posters of the Cuban revolutionary. After completing studies at Harvard and an unsuccessful diplomatic battle to save his father’s life, Murtaza’s formation of a leftist guerrilla outfit bent on ousting General Zia earned him the title of a terrorist. Following the General’s own mysterious death (1988) and Benazir’s rise to power, Murtaza grew increasingly critical of his sister, who he felt had betrayed the socialist ideals upon which the PPP was founded. He eventually returned to Pakistan with political aspirations – having won a seat in a provincial assembly – only to face an uphill struggle against a hostile PPP government.
Chalmers Johnson, RIP
November 21st, 2010 § 8 Comments
Chalmers Johnson
The great Chalmers Johnson is no more. An examplary scholar, Johnson metamorphosed from a hardline Cold Warrior into one of the most formidable critics of the American Empire, mapping its ever expanding imperium of bases. His 2000 book Blowback was prophetic, and his subsequent books The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis have been equally prescient. Each one is a must read.
Here is (to the best of my knowledge) the last recorded interview with Johnson in which he discusses his latest book, Dismantling the Empire, which I haven’t had the pleasure of reading yet:
Olbermann and Turley on the prospects of Bush being prosecuted
November 21st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Outposts
November 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Avocadoes
Whatever the Western media calls them, the illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank are very far from being outposts. They are connected to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv by fast, Jews-only motorways. Their villas have swimming pools and lawns (a settler is allocated eight times more water than a Palestinian). Even the most recent and farflung of settlements are tooled-up enough to intimidate the Arabs on whose land they encroach.
It’s the Palestinian villages which feel like outposts, although some have been settled for thousands of years. Even when they’re close to major cities they are vulnerable, intermittently cut-off, and surrounded by wolves (or boars).
An example is Iraq Burin, a mountain-top village just a kilometre from Nablus but one trapped behind a checkpoint. Not only are the villagers unable to access city shops and services, they face violent harrassment from soldiers and armed men from the nearby Bracha settlement.
There’s an unarmed ‘popular’ struggle against land confiscation being waged here. It involves weekly demonstrations which are met by tear gas and sometimes bullets (in March two teenagers were killed). Similar protests are held in villages all over the West Bank, most famously in Bil’in, Nil’in and Budrus.
Cinematic therapy for Israeli soldiers
November 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
A scene from "Lebanon"
I’ve just written an article for The Electronic Intifada, comparing the Palestinian film Salt of This Sea—in which the sea represents Palestinian dispossession—with the Israeli film Lebanon, in which Lebanon is represented by the interior of an invading Israeli tank.
Samuel Maoz, the director of Lebanon, was a tank gunner in the 1982 Israeli war on that country. The Observer conducted a lengthy interview with him in May of this year. The following is an excerpt from my article for EI:
According to the The Observer: ‘For Maoz, making his film turned out to be, cliched though this sounds, healing. As he wrote the script, he realized he was at last able to put some distance between himself and his past. … Physically, too, something changed. “Two days into the shoot, I developed an infection in my leg. It was so painful I could hardly walk. The doctor gave me antibiotics and I went to bed for a day. When I woke up, the pain was gone.” He looked down at his foot and, there beside it on the mattress, were five small pieces of shrapnel, rejected by his body after nearly three decades, evidence, he believes, of “the connection between body and soul.”’
