Archives for posts with tag: israel

NYT columnist Friedman cheers on terrorism against Palestinian civilians

January 14, 09
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New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, seen above being pied by student activists at Brown University last spring for “his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet,” among other offenses, is shamelessly warmongering again.

In his column today he effectively endorses Israeli terrorism against Palestinian civilians.  He says he hopes Israel’s goal is to “educate Hamas.”  Then he explains that by “educate,” he means inflict massive collateral damage on the civilian population around Hamas, as Israel also did with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”

[...]

In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims. [emphasis added by Glenn Greenwald]

Watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has put out an alert urging folks to contact the Times’ Public Editor with their complaints.   In the absence of a gooey pie to the face, Friedman and his enablers at the Times’ opinion page need to hear from us.

It continues

January 12, 09
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Just took this screenshot from Al Jazeera’s live shot of Gaza. The bombing is continuing. It is intensifying. And this looks like white phosphorous.

This is the first time I’ve seen the bombing of a city live on a screen. It’s one thing to see footage after the fact of injured and dead families.  It’s another to sit and witness the bombing itself as it happens.  To know that innocent people are dying in that moment.  To hear a rooster crowing and morning prayers amidst the deafening booms of falling shells and bombs.   I keep cringing and covering my eyes every time there’s another blast, as if I’m shielding myself from something.  It is horrifying, just to watch.

Again, download Livestation (small, clean program) to watch AJE live.  We need media reform justice in this country so that people can watch this channel normally on their televisions.

“Hamas targets” and Livestation

January 6, 09
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Don’t miss the Heathlander’s examination of all those “Hamas targets” the Israeli military is hitting in Gaza. Also, I discovered a fantastic program called Livestation yesterday. Al Jazeera English, which still has several correspondents in Gaza reporting directly on the impact of the war, is one of a number of international news channels that can be watched in a high-quality streaming format.

Israeli military takes the misinformation war to Youtube

January 4, 09
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The video below was posted to the new Israel Defense Forces (IDF) channel on Youtube on Monday and titled “Israeli Air Force Strikes Rockets in Transit.” It received over 200,000 views and collective 4 out of 5 star rating from Youtube users. It showed “The Israeli Air Force strikes terror operatives transferring short-range missiles destined for innocent civilians,” according to the video’s description, which was posted English, Hebrew and Arabic.

In reality, fact-finding by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and Al Jazeera English has found that the grainy white figures loading up a truck before being blown up in the video are themselves innocent civilians. One of individuals was a 14-year-old boy. The video below has been viewed less than 30,000 times on Youtube.

The Israeli military’s Youtube videos are together a first-hand view of the war on Gaza from the perspective of Israeli warplanes. But clearly their main function is as aggressive propaganda for the Israeli war. The video above disguises the bombing of a group of civilians as a precision strike against terrorists. What’s new is that this misinformation is being distributed without mediation by any filter and with great success through a top Web 2.0 website. Youtube has become the second most popular site on the planet because of the social networking and content-creation features it brought to the medium of video. The company describes itself as “empowering them [people] to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.”

I don’t think giving any government an outlet on Youtube for unabashed pro-war propaganda serves that mission. And I wonder if, say, the governments of Iran, Russia, or Hamas for that matter would be allowed to do the same thing. At least when President-Elect Barack Obama’s team posts videos, they allows comments and video responses which appear on the same page. Not the case with the IDF’s videos. There’s nothing Web 2.0 about this propaganda which makes it any better than the old.

(Not only that, but a bunch of folks at Reddit say a user-submitted video which shows the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza from the below on the ground has been censored.)

Podcast: Austinites raise their voices for Gaza

January 1, 09
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Image from sweejack on Flickr

Hundreds of Austinites, young and old, students and workers, gathered in front of the Capitol on Monday evening to demonstrate against the Israeli bombings in the Gaza strip. Here’s my report:

(Working on improving the audio quality, folks. Next time it’ll be better. Produced using a Zoom H2 and Audacity.)

Update: Here’s the transcript of the report, with links, below the jump. (more…)

“We are all Gazans now”

December 30, 08
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Not much posting last week because of intermittent internet access, sorry. I’ll be making up for it this week. I left the following comment on another blog – it covers a lot of what I’d like to say about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.

1. Hamas’ rocket fire into Israeli towns is wrong under any circumstances and must be condemned.

2. Israel broke the last ceasefire, by which Hamas was abiding at the time, when it launched a ground raid into the Gaza Strip on the day of the US election. It apparently violated another truce when it launched this latest assault. The question of proportionality aside, in this sense Israel has already broken rules by which it or any other international actor would be expected to abide.

3. We don’t know how many civilians have been killed/maimed, but there is no basis for claiming Israel has done a ‘stellar job’ at sparing civilians from harm. We do know that the IOF is dropping US-made bunker-busting bombs on one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. They have bombed a police graduation ceremony, several Islamic University buildings, a Hamas sports center, mosques, and several UN clinics and facilities. We know that dozens of women and children have already died and hundreds more are injured. This is on top of the collective punishment inflicted by Israel’s blockade on Gaza, which has seriously depleted medical, power, and food stocks.

4. Israel is not really in the same situation as other Western powers who have faced popular insurgencies. Hamas’ home-made rockets rarely hit their targets. But supposing the analogy is legit, those nations that reacted with reckless and overwhelming military assaults against popular insurgencies tended to be ineffective and deserving of moral condemnation for the wanton ‘collateral damage’ they caused. Nothing different in this case.

5. Americans cannot look at the attack on Gaza as disinterested observers from an outside party. We are directly complicit in the conflict so long as our taxes and government continue to be a major means of support for the Israeli military apparatus. People absolutely need to apply their morals to this issue and take the appropriate civic action.

For me, the best coverage of the conflict is at the Heathlander. Most of the claims above can be sourced from there.

Also see Lenin.

Israel found lacking in press freedom

October 22, 08
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Here at the University of Texas, a Jewish student group called Hillel holds a massive “Israel Block Party” every year celebrating all things Israel.  Which is fine, except that there’s a lot of oppression that gets swept under the rug during the party, as with most nationalist celebrations.  The organizers portray Israel as a thriving and diverse liberal democracy, and it is in some aspects.  But then they go too far – every year that I attended the party with pro-Palestine protesters I saw the slogan “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”  Not true.  Israel doesn’t rank all that high in ensuring freedom for the press, either, according to a new report by Reporters Sans Frontieres.  Via the Heathlander.