Category: Gaza

Resisting Genocide

The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network released the following statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day:

How does the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow!…
She weeps sore into the night, and her tears are on her cheeks:
among all who loved her she has none to comfort her.
(Book of Lamentations)

Last week, after murdering 1400 people – of whom 400 were children – after bombing hospitals and mosques, schools, universities and humanitarian supplies, and tens of thousand of homes, Israel declared a cease-fire. A shameful parade of European leaders immediately went to Jerusalem to embrace the mass murderers and to pledge their support for the continuing siege of Gaza.

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Israeli army used flechettes against Gaza civilians

Latest report from Amnesty International’s fact-finding team in Gaza:

A flechette embedded in a wall in a Bedouin villlage in Gaza
A flechette embedded in a wall in a Bedouin villlage in Gaza

Monday January 26: The Israeli army’s use of white phosphorus in densely populated civilian areas of Gaza has captured much of the world’s media interest. However, the Israeli forces also used a variety of other weapons against civilian residential built-up areas throughout the Gaza Strip in the three-week conflict that began on 27 December.

Among these are flechettes – tiny metal darts (4cm long, sharply pointed at the front and with four fins at the rear) that are packed into120mm shells. These shells, generally fired from tanks, explode in the air and scatter some 5,000 to 8,000 flechettes in a conical pattern over an area around 300 metres wide and 100 metres long.

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Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza Appeal

The Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza Appeal TV advert that the BBC refused to broadcast.

Jimmy Carter: ‘Peace is possible’ in Holy Land

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).

The Islamic University of Gaza

Photographs from the Islamic University of Gaza:

Before

islamic university gaza
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BBC’s Mark Thompson Soft on Israel?

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.

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At the heart of BBC row, the homeless of Gaza

Safaa Salam, 10, with her brother Salman Salam
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.

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This cowardly decision betrays the values the corporation stands for

Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn takes his former employer to task over its disgraceful acquiescence in Israeli efforts to withhold relief from Gaza’s long-suffering population.

On Tuesday, speaking from a pulpit in Westminster Abbey, the director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, paid tribute to one of the corporation’s greatest journalists and broadcasters, Charles Wheeler, who died last summer at the age of 85.

Thompson spoke in reverential terms of Wheeler: his independence; his dislike of authority, any authority; his relentless search for the truth, in postwar Germany, in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, LBJ, Vietnam, Nixon; in India, Kuwait, Kurdistan. Thompson was right. Wheeler was a giant among BBC journalists, rightly hailed as one of the best of his generation.

But even as Thompson spoke, the corporation was traducing every tradition that Wheeler, and many of us who still work for the BBC, have tried to live by. The corporation’s chief operating officer, Caroline Thomson, had refused to allow it to broadcast an appeal on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee for Gaza. She said that one reason was that “the BBC’s impartiality was in danger of being damaged”. Could the BBC be sure, she added, that money raised for this cause would find its way to the right people?

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Winning and Losing in Gaza

Richard Falk, the United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in the Occupied Territories, in The Nation:

Now that there is a cease-fire in Gaza, questions are emerging about what Israel has achieved. Of course, the lopsided casualty figures and Israel’s military dominance certainly make it the battlefield winner. But such a “mission accomplished” assessment is as misleading in occupied Palestine as it was in Iraq. Although Hamas could not come close to matching Israel’s armed might, it may have won a major battle for Palestinian hearts and minds. Reports from the West Bank, Gaza and the Palestinian diaspora suggest widespread anger at the Palestinian Authority for its passivity and a rise in support for Hamas, even among secular Palestinians, in appreciation of its determined resistance to the brutality of the Israeli occupation and military operations. If Hamas becomes the dominant political force in all of occupied Palestine when the next elections are held, Israel will be the loser.

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Tony Benn Slams the BBC

Tony Benn slams the BBC’s ill-advised decision not to broadcast a Gaza Charity Appeal. He makes the appeal himself.  And kudos to Benn for his refusal to reduce this to a mere humanitarian issue; as he points out, Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinian people.