This started out as a story for Free Speech Radio News but didn’t make it into today’s newscast. I’ve heard of the Flash player not working for a few folks. Listen to the MP3 if that’s the case for you. Cross-posted to Houston Indymedia, now featured on Indymedia.us.
A Fort Hood soldier faced a military trial today for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, one week after another member of his unit was sentenced to 30 days in jail for refusing to go to war. Sergeant Travis Bishop was convicted on all charges and sentenced to one year in prison, loss of pay, and reduction in rank. (more…)
On this Memorial Day, let’s honor those vets speaking out against war and struggling with its aftereffects too. Here’s a superb short film about a new G.I. resistance cafe outside Fort Hood, released two weeks ago by two UT radio-television-film students. Via Houston IMC →
I got the chance to interviewHoward Zinn three years ago, in a sparse hotel room near the University of Texas campus. It was a cloudy day and with the lights turned off, the room was very blue. Zinn sat on the bed across from me and my co-interviewer in his socks. I wondered if there was a more down-to-earth, wry, and knowledgeable historian in the country. I read his seminal work, “A People’s History of the United States” a few months later.
Zinn spoke a few weeks ago at the 100th Anniversary of the Progressive Magazine. Speaking without notes, he proceeded to lay out a common-sense rebuttal to what passes for common sense in this country – the idea that the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War II were all necessary and just wars. Good wars, as many call them. It’s a talk that, like his book, fundamentally challenges the normative identity of America. Watch it here.
He does speak slowly. That might make the talk less accessible to some people, understandably. So if you’re pressed for time, listen to the edited version of the speech below. I shaved about 12 minutes of mostly dead air off the original recording and it moves along more quickly. But in this version you do miss Zinn’s wry humor, which is hilarious at times. Have a listen, and pass it on. Embed code here, mp3 here.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I got the chance to 