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June 2010

Palestine: Israeli Love Song

neverbeforecampaign — 4 avril 2010 — When the Israeli regime feels that it has to create a ministry for propaganda, you know that they are worried. This concern is shared by dedicated Zionists and other misled people all over the world. Their concern is simple: the world is begginning to realize that the Israeli regime and its policies are nothing better than any other, past or present, discriminatory/apartheid regime.

No amount of spinning tactics or communications strategies will reverse this long overdue awakening. Yet, the Zionists and their regime persist. Over the past few years we have seen initiative after initiative, document after document, and campaign after campaign, to revert to the old pereceptions that the Israeli regime represents the values of freedom, liberty and equality. This regimes latest move, an initiative to turn every citizen into a PR ambassador highlights the desperation of its spin masters and PR firms.

Along these lines, many documents have been compiled to guide anyone willing to defend the Israeli regime and its policies. Most striking, and what we have been seeing for years by Israeli politicians and advocates, is the focus on the audacious claim that the Israeli regime, and its occupation army, actually cares about the Palestinian people.

It is the same old story for all oppressors eventually their image comes to fall, and soon afterwards, so do they.

Many of the photos are by:
“Michael Ramallah”: http://occupiedlove.blogspot.com/
Ahmad Mesleh: http://www.ahmadmesleh.wordpress.com

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The Israel/Palestine one-state solution sounds like a good idea, but…

Solving the problem of Israel/Palestine isn’t rocket science: the solution is obvious. We just have to get serious about it

By Roger Tucker

18 June 2010

Roger Tucker outlines the case for a one-state solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict, arguing that this is the only formula that would provide peace, justice and security for Jews and Palestinians and avoid a possible catastrophe for the rest of the world.

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Eyewitness to the Israeli Assault on the Mavi Marmara

What Kevin Neish Saw

By DAVE LINDORFF

Kevin Neish of Victoria, British Columbia, didn’t know he was a celebrity until he was about to board a flight from Istanbul to Ottawa. “This Arab woman wearing a beautiful outfit suddenly ran up to me crying, ‘It’s you! From Arab TV! You’re famous!’” he recalls with a laugh. “I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she told me, ‘I saw you flipping through the Israeli commando’s book! It’s being aired over and over!’”

A soft-spoken teacher and former civilian engineer with the Canadian Department of Defense, Neish realized then that a video taken by an Arab TV cameraman in the midst of the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza of him flipping through a booklet had been transmitted before the Israelis blocked all electronic signals from the flotilla. The booklet had pictures and profiles of all the passengers, and he’d found it in the backpack of an Israeli Defense Force commando.

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Turkey and the Neocons

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Tuesday, June 15, 2010 – 5:33 PM

It couldn’t be more predictable. Back when Israel and Turkey were strategic allies with extensive military-to-military ties, prominent neoconservatives were vocal defenders of the Turkish government and groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and AIPAC encouraged Congress not to pass resolutions that would have labeled what happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks during World War I a “genocide.” (The “Armenian lobby” is no slouch, but it’s no match for AIPAC and its allies in the Israel lobby). The fact that the ADL was in effect protecting another country against the charge of genocide is more than a little ironic, but who ever said that political organizations had to be ethically consistent? Once relations between Israel and Turkey began to fray, however — fueled primarily by Turkish anger over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians — the ADL and AIPAC withdrew their protection and Congressional defenders of Israel began switching sides, too.

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Independent journalists dismantling Israel’s hold on media narrative

Israeli naval ships trailing the Mavi Marmara. (Cultures of Resistance)

Abraham Greenhouse, Nora Barrows-Friedman

EI, June 15, 2010

“The systematic attempt and very deliberate first priority for the Israeli soldiers as they came on the ships was to shut down the story, to confiscate all cameras, to shut down satellites, to smash the CCTV cameras that were on the Mavi Marmara, to make sure that nothing was going out. They were hellbent on controlling the story,” commented Australian journalist Paul McGeough, one of the hundreds of activists and reporters who witnessed the deadly morning attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla on 31 May (“Framing the Narrative: Israeli Commandos Seize Videotape and Equipment from Journalists After Deadly Raid,” Democracy Now, 9 June 2010). McGeough was one of at least 60 journalists aboard the flotilla who were detained and their footage confiscated.

Within hours of the Gaza-bound aid flotilla being intercepted and besieged in international waters by Israeli commandos, who killed at least nine — some at point-blank range — aboard the Mavi Marmara, news of the bloody attack had spread across the globe. Rage, condemnation and calls for an international investigation followed.

Meanwhile, Israel’s campaign to spin the attack, distort the facts and quell an outraged public was already in full swing. Concurrently, activists and skeptical journalists began deconstructing the official story and assembling evidence to uncover the truth behind the violent deaths of activists on a humanitarian mission to the besieged Gaza Strip.

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Cashiering Helen Thomas

By Ralph Nader

June 15, 2010 “Information Clearing House” –The termination of Helen Thomas’ 62-year long career as a pioneering, no-nonsense newswoman was swift and intriguingly merciless.

The event leading to her termination began when she was sitting on a White House bench under oppressive summer heat. The 89-year-old hero of honest journalism and women’s rights, the scourge of dissembling presidents and White House press secretaries, answered a passing visitor’s question about Israel with a snappish comment worded in a way she didn’t mean; she promptly apologized in writing. Recorded without permission on a hand video, the brief exchange, that included a defense of dispossessed Palestinians, went internet viral on Friday, June 4.

By Monday, Helen Thomas was considered finished, even though she embodied a steadfast belief, in the praiseworthy words of Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, “that anybody standing on that podium [in the White House] should be regarded with skepticism.”

Over the weekend, her lecture agent dropped her. Her column syndicator, the Hearst company, pressed her to quit “effective immediately,” and, it was believed that the White House Correspondents Association, of which she was the first female president, was about to take away her coveted front row seat in the White House press room

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Paris Dedicates Place to Mahmoud Darwish

Date : 14/6/2010 Time : 14:14

PARIS, June 14, 2010 (WAFA)- President Mahmoud Abbas and the Mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë inaugurated, Monday, Mahmoud Darwish Square in the French capital.

The Municipality of Paris said in a statement, Thursday that this place would be inaugurated to honor the work of this great poet of Palestine.

Mahmoud Darwish received numerous awards for his work and his writings have been translated into several languages. He is recognized as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.

The decision to name a place in Paris after Mahmoud Darwish has been passed by the Council of Paris in April.

Delanoe said that ‘He is a great poet who we want to honor by naming a place of Paris after him. He is not just any poet, a Palestinian poet, a poet whose inspiration is born of his suffering in exile.’

‘Mahmoud Darwish is also a fighter. I honor his this morning as the leader of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization, which the writer has long been a part) is present,’ he added.

President Abbas said: ‘Mahmoud Darwish was always talking about the day when the Palestinian people could lead a normal life like other peoples in their independent country. We, the people of Darwish, say we’re going to pursue the path till the day comes where we live in a Palestine without occupation, without the blockade, without walls.”

‘We love life when we have the means to it,’ he said, quoting a verse from Darwish.

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Israelis filmed their own weapons as showing like they are ours and threw our cameras into the sea

cdr23d1 — 9 juin 2010 — Osama Qashoo and other passengers give their first arrowing accounts of what really happened on the Mavi Marmara.

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The Helen Thomas’ Resolution by Gilad Atzmon

Those who are engaged in the Palestinian solidarity discourse are familiar with two visions of conflict resolution: the ‘Two State Solution’ and the ‘One State Solution’. This week we have learned about a third possible resolution that seems to me the most reasonable and ethical considering the circumstances.

Helen Thomas, the 89 years old doyenne of the White House press corps, sketched it in one sentence. When asked by a Rabbi holding a camera: “where should Israelis go”, she said Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine”. When the Rabbi challenged her, she made it plainly clear: “they should go home to Poland, Germany, America and elsewhere”

Thomas was quick to be reminded who runs Capitol Hill. A global war was declared against her. She had to resign and to apologise. However, her brief yet transparently clear solution is sound and should be elaborated upon.

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