Jeremy Dear on the BBC and the DEC appeal

The general secretary of the National Union of Journalists Jeremy Dear has written a piece for Tribune criticising the BBC’s DEC decision.  Dear says he has received “emails from senior BBC journalists who say this decision makes the BBC look pro-Israeli and indifferent to the plight of 1.5 million Palestinian victims and those who say the BBC has breached its own rules on impartiality.”  He also makes some contentious observations on the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s assault and criticises the response from the anti-war movement:

This week, I witnessed protestors outside Broadcasting House chanting: “BBC hear us say, how many kids have you killed today?” Well, none. It is not true, as many anti-war groups have claimed, that the BBC has “capitulated to the Israeli lie machine”. There has been some excellent journalism during this conflict by BBC and other journalists, despite the Israeli ban on foreign reporters entering Gaza and the arrest and the killing of five Palestinian journalists.

And those who threaten a boycott of the BBC licence fee are mistaken. Those on the right have spent years trying to undermine BBC funding for their own political and commercial self-interest. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of destroying the BBC in the long term because of heartfelt, but short-term, anger at this decision.

Aldous Huxley: The Ultimate Revolution

Aldous huxleyAldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, rated number one in the List Muse Top 100 Fiction books list, here discusses influence, controlling the public mind and government.

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”  Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution (44:17): MP3

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Beyond Occupation

Sydney Ideas: Sydney University, Australia. Oct 14th, 2008

Dr. Sara Roy, a senior Middle Eastern studies research scholar at Harvard University, discusses the economic impact of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and argues that Israel’s policies are aimed at keeping the territory impoverished and dependent. (via FORA.tv; thanks Iffit)

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The silence of the jurists

An excellent article by Gideon Levy, condemning the complicity of Israeli lawyers in the war crimes of their own government. Most lawyers, Levy argues, are complicit simply through their silence, as “there is only one group now preoccupied with the war: the members of the Israel Defense Forces international law division, who continue to serve their bosses with piercing obedience, legitimizing every criminal act.” There are some who are even rewarded for their noble efforts, like Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, who has been offered to “to join the staff of lecturers at Tel Aviv University’s law faculty, where she will present her doctrine of ‘devious jurisprudence that permits mass killing,’ in the words of the jurist Professor Haim Ganz.”

Incidentally, these lawyers were joined in their efforts to legitimize war crimes by the Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos who vowed to “amend legislation that granted a Spanish judge the authority to launch a much-publicized war crimes investigation against senior Israeli officials” after pressure from Israeli leaders [preliminary court investigations were launched by a judge at the national court in Madrid on Thursday, 30 January 2009].

One silence, of all the shameful silences, has thus far roared especially loud – the silence of the jurists. The 41,000 attorneys in the State of Israel are entrusted with protecting its image as a lawful state, and this large and grand army has once again strayed from its function. There is a deep suspicion throughout the world that Israel carried out a series of war crimes, and the jurists of our country are holding their peace.

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On Palestinian Resistance and Israeli Psychosis

Hamas isn’t Hizbullah, and Gaza isn’t Lebanon. The resistance in Gaza – which includes leftist and nationalist as well as Islamist forces – doesn’t have mountains to fight in. It has no strategic depth. It doesn’t have Syria behind it to keep supply lines open; instead it has Mubarak’s goons and Israel’s wall. Lebanese civilians can flee north and east; the repeat-refugees of Gaza have no escape. The Lebanese have their farms, and supplies from outside; Gaza has been under total siege for years. What else? Hizbullah has remarkable discipline. It is surely the best-trained, best-organised army in the region, perhaps in the world (I’m not talking of weapons, but of men and women). Hamas, on the other hand, though it has made great strides, is still undisciplined. Crucially, Hizbullah has air-tight intelligence control in Lebanon, while Gaza contains collaborators like maggots in a corpse.

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Britain funds brutal torturers of the West Bank

Palestine

While Israel is crushing resistance in Gaza the British are funding the Palestinian collaboration Authority of Fatah to crush any resistance to Israeli domination and control in the West Bank.  For more on the funding of Fatah by the west, to topple the democratically elected government of Hamas, see Vanity Fairs The Gaza Bombshell.

The horrific torture of hundreds of people by Palestinian security forces in the West Bank is being funded by British taxpayers.

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Belgium to stop exporting ‘arms that bolster the IDF’ to Israel

Though no official decision has been taken as yet, a consensus is emerging amongst leading Belgian politicians to ban the sales of weapons to the IDF.

Belgium’s government has agreed to ban the export to Israel of weapons that “strengthen it militarily,” a Belgian minister said on Thursday. A Brussels-based research group accused Israel of enlisting child soldiers.

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Gaza desperately short of food after Israel destroys farmland

“Officials warn of ‘destruction of all means of life’ after the three-week conflict leaves agriculture in the region in ruins”, reports Peter Beaumont in The Observer. Lest we forget, the BBC shares the blame for any suffering that might occur as a result of this shortage.

Gaza‘s 1.5 million people are facing a food crisis as a result of the destruction of great areas of farmland during the Israeli invasion.

According to the World Food Programme, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and Palestinian officials, between 35% and 60% of the agriculture industry has been wrecked by the three-week Israeli attack, which followed two years of economic siege.

Christine van Nieuwenhuyse, the World Food Programme’s country director, said: “We are hearing that 60% of the land in the north – where the farming was most intensive – may not be exploitable again. It looks to me like a disaster. It is not just farmland, but poultry as well.

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Militainment

The first Gulf War was recently descibed by Robert Fisk as a turning point, where Western society seemed indifferent to war and civilian casualties, he discerned that part of the problem was due to journalism saying “our television lads and lasses played it [the war] for all it was worth – it was the first war that had ‘theme’ music to go with the pictures”.

Militainment is a documentary on this phenomena where journalism blends with entertainment and the military establishment.

A Capped Volcano of Suffering

Friend of Pulse, independent journalist Dahr Jamail is in Iraq to report on the elections.  Here he explains the differences in Iraq since his last trip and describes the mood as having changed from one of hope to one like a capped volcano of suffering:

Baghdad today [Thursday 29 January], on the eve of provincial elections, feels like it has emerged from several years of horrendous violence, but do not be misled. Every Iraqi I’ve spoken with feels it is tenuous, the still-fragile lull too young to trust.

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