Wed May 16, 2012 10:00am EDT
* State media on a propaganda offensive
* Despite accusations of opposition crimes, confessions are “illogical”
* Ex-state TV producer supports Assad, but hates campaign of misinformation
BEIRUT, May 16 (Reuters) – Syria’s state media is fighting hard to cast the country’s unrest as an Islamist terrorist conspiracy rather than a popular uprising against the dynastic rule of President Bashar al-Assad.
State television airs interviews with men confessing to acts of violence, sullying the image of Assad’s opponents. But the interviews are mocked by many Syrians and an ex-producer says that many confessions are bogus.
Although an ardent supporter of Assad, the former employee said she is distressed by what she describes as a campaign of misinformation waged by the official “Suriya” television channel.
“I used to arrive at work and one of the editors would tell us that we have a person to confess,” she told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from her former employer.
“Some of the men are just normal people who were arrested in anti-government demonstrations and others were thieves and criminals who were nearing the end of their sentence,” said the producer, in her late twenties. “They were told they will be set free if they confess to the made-up crimes.”
One confession was that of Qusai Shaqfeh from Hama, a city that has seen fighting between rebels and government troops in recent months and has a long history of dissent against the Assads – Bashar’s late father Hafez sent troops to crush an uprising there in 1982, killing thousands.
Shaqfeh, 29, said in the aired programme that rebels killed members of the security forces and threw them off a bridge. He also said he contacted journalists working for foreign media and sent them footage of faked peaceful demonstrations to use as propaganda against Assad.
Another confession gained particular fame in Syria when the confessor, Ghassin Selawaya from the coastal city of Lattakia, appeared to be playing to the demands of the producer.
“Er…we burned buses…er…we resisted security patrols, it was all rioting,” he muttered, sitting in a T-shirt surrounded by a shotgun and pistols, weapons the presenter said police found on him.
Opposition activists said that Selawaya’s family said he was in fact arrested before the uprising for unrelated crimes. The Syrian government restricts media access, making it hard to verify reports.
REPORTS OF TORTURE
For more than a year, peaceful protesters demanding Assad’s overthrow have been arrested, tortured and killed, human rights groups say. But dissidents have increasingly resorted to armed ambushes and bomb attacks on elements of state security, and a recent Human Rights Watch report accused the armed opposition of kidnappings, torture and executions.
State media has never reported on government abuses but aired “terrorist confessions” early last year when activists posted videos of Assad’s troops firing on demonstrations and there was little evidence of an armed uprising.
For many Syrians, pro- and anti-Assad, the confessions are a running joke.
“I do not think that Syrian television lies in all its stories, but the information in these confessions is really conflicting and confusing,” said Rami, 33, a government worker who, like other ordinary Syrians quoted in this article, was interviewed via Skype from Damascus and asked to be identified by his first name only, for security reasons.
Reem, a 32-year-old journalist, said she never trusted state media, seeing it as a mouthpiece of Assad’s inner circle, but the TV confessions were a new low.
“If they were actually criminals, they should be sent to courts, not to a TV studio,” she said.
“The confessions can be pretty funny,” the producer said. “They are clearly illogical.”
“Our editors would ask us to think up stories that will be believable. For example, if we had a man who was from a certain city, we would tell him to talk about specific streets or confess to a crime committed recently in that city,” she said.
“There were some confessors who seem to have signs of torture but I did not ask too many questions,” she said.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
In late April, pro-government news channel “Addounia” aired what it said was a confession by “terrorist” Ali Othman, who activists say was arrested in March after he helped foreign journalists escape from the besieged city of Homs.
The interview, which was over an hour long, was publicised a few days beforehand.
In the teaser, the Addounia interviewer walks through dark corridors as tense music plays. He creaks open a metal-barred door and walks inside a prison cell, where Ali Othman sits with his head in his hands.
Othman rises and the next shot shows him sitting opposite the presenter, both spotlighted in a dark room.
“Stay tuned Inside Baba Amr,” words on the screen read, referring to the district in Homs that was heavily shelled by the Syrian government because it was supposedly swarming with “armed terrorists.”
In the interview, Othman said that people attending anti-Assad protests pretended to be peaceful but had hidden guns under their jackets to attack security members.
He also described running a media centre in Baba Amr, smuggling foreign journalists in and out of the country and organising dissident protesters.
Fellow activists said the interview was conducted under duress and Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a statement just after Othman was arrested that there were reports that he had been tortured.
Suriya’s ex-producer said that many who confessed appeared afraid.
“I sometimes used to wonder why Suriya wanted people to make these confessions,” she said.
“My managing editor once told us that the goal is to show people that the government is in control and also so that parents see what happens if they let their children oppose the government.”
Aisha, a 42-year-old housewife who comes from the same minority Alawite sect as President Assad, said that although she does not trust the confessions, she knows they have a use.
“I watch the confessions in front of my children and try to convince them that they are real because I want them to be scared of what will happen if they look for trouble,” she said. (Additional reporting by Erika Solomon; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
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Washington, DC – Lydda, a city home to some 20,000 Palestinians in 1948 quickly swelled to a population of 50,000 as refugees flocked from the cleansed city of Jaffa. After four days of siege, Israeli forces carried out expulsion orders during Operation Dani, leaving fewer than 1,000 residents remaining.
Yitzhak Rabin, an Israeli Brigadier General at the time, described how they perpetrated the ethnic cleansing of Lydda and neighbouring Ramle in July of 1948. To this day, however, the Israeli state prevents this description from being printed in Rabin’s memoirs.
I often wonder what must have been going through my grandfather’s head when he, and others among the few who managed to remain, realised the busy municipality that they had once called home had been reduced to a ghost town.
Perhaps they were in shock, an understandable reaction, given the circumstances. Perhaps they were busy attempting to care for the injured, of which there were plenty. Or maybe they were trying to secure their possessions from Israeli looters who ravaged the vacant homes and stores of businessmen-turned-refugees overnight. Israeli historians, such as Tom Segev, note that 1,800 trucks of possessions were looted from Lydda alone.
Once the dust cleared and the shock subsided, reality must have begun to set in. In a few months’ time, the Palestinian Arabs had gone from being a majority living in their ancestral homeland, albeit amid tension, to being a minority living under a state that had just made refugees out of most of their kin and would refuse them re-entry.
Legalising theft
For Palestinian citizens of Israel, like Palestinians elsewhere, the Nakba was just beginning. The looting which took place was also a preliminary glimpse into the theft of land, property and identity that would ensue in the coming years.
Ironically, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who Rabin said ordered the expulsion of Palestinians during Operation Dani, expressed shock that Israelis were simply stealing the possessions of Palestinians in Lydda and elsewhere. How he reconciled a moral defence of ethnic cleansing with moral outrage at looting is beyond my comprehension.
| “Yaacov Shapire, an Israeli attorney in 1946, did not mince words when criticising these laws used by the British against the Zionists at the time and likened them to Nazi Germnay. Two years later, Shapira… would adopt these very laws to rule over the Arab minority.“ |
Nonetheless, with the establishment of the state of Israel on the ruins of Palestine, theft had to be disguised by legalisms. Prior to the war, Jewish ownership of land in Palestine was minimal. Now, after the depopulation, the vast majority of land controlled by the Jewish state was not owned by Jews and many of the owners now resided in refugee camps.
To solve this predicament, the Israeli legislature enacted various laws which allowed the state to assume control of 92 per cent of the land. The first step was using a century old Ottoman law (two-empires old at this point) to declare the land “absentee land”. This meant that the owners of the land were not present (because they were refugees not permitted to return) and that the state could assume control of it.
But refugees weren’t the only ones dispossessed by this measure. Palestinians who managed to remain inside the boundaries of the new Israeli state but were prevented from living on their land became internally displaced persons (IDPs). These IDPs falling victim to Israel’s legalised land theft are known as “present absentees”.
Martial law
With their society decimated, their family members and kin spread across the region in refugee camps from Lebanon to Jordan to Gaza, their properties looted and land confiscated, Palestinian citizens of Israel had to deal with another reality in the wake of the Nakba: living under martial law.
Israeli martial law, which governed Palestinian Arabs from the establishment of the state to 1966, was based on British Mandate-era emergency regulations. In the 1930s, the British used these regulations as the framework for the repression of the Palestinian Arab uprisings. Then in the 1940s, the British used them to crack down against Zionist dissidents. For this reason, such regulations were decried by Zionists prior to the establishment of the state. Yaacov Shapira, an Israeli attorney in 1946, did not mince words when criticising these laws used by the British against the Zionists at the time and likened them to Nazi Germany. Two years later, Shapira would be serving as the attorney general for the first Israeli government and would adopt these very laws to rule over the Arab minority.
Martial law was similar in many ways to the occupation we know today. During this period, the military government was empowered to deport people from their towns or villages, summon any person to a police station at any time or put under house arrest, use administrative detention or incarceration without charge, confiscate property, impose total or partial curfew, forbid or restrict movement and so on.
This, keep in mind, was not happening in Hebron or Nablus or Ramallah, this was taking place in what many today romanticise as the golden age of “democratic” Israel – inside the green line.
| “I enjoy it, especially when travelling between Haifa and Tel Aviv, and there is not a single Arab to be seen.“– Israeli member of the MAPAI secretariat |
Discriminatory laws
After the depopulation, an Israeli member of the MAPAI secretariat remarked in 1949: “The landscape is also more beautiful. I enjoy it, especially when travelling between Haifa and Tel Aviv, and there is not a single Arab to be seen.”
It is this kind of drive for ethnic homogeneity, present since the founding of the Israeli state, that underpins many of the laws that discriminate against Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens. A Jew from anywhere in the world, for example, can move to Israel – while a Palestinian Arab refugee, born within the present-day borders of Israel is not permitted to return. Likewise, laws also prevent Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel who have non-citizen Palestinian spouses from residing in Israel as a family. This is to prevent what the Israeli prime minister termed “demographic spillover”. This restricts the population of Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying from most of their kin because doing so would mean either having to live separately or living outside of Israel.
Budgetary spending is also discriminatory. Despite making up over 20 per cent of the population, Palestinian citizens of Israel have watched the state build hundreds of new towns for Israeli Jews, while a handful were built for the Palestinians. Even these towns, such as Rahat, were built in part to concentrate Palestinian Bedouin from unrecognised villages. Many Palestinian Bedouin villages remain unrecognised by the Israeli state, are not provided with civil resources and are left off the electric grid. Al-Arakib, a village in the Negev, has, as of this writing, been demolished by Israeli officials, and rebuilt by its residents, some 38 times.
Lingering in the psyche
Indeed, the Nakba is the central and uniting experience of Palestinians everywhere. It comes as no surprise then that Palestinian citizens of Israel alive today, who did not experience the Nakba first hand,still have political views shaped by the events of 1948.
Polls of Palestinian citizens of Israel, performed as recently as 2010, uncovered interesting trends in the views of respondents based on whether they have relatives who were refugees. Those who have refugee relatives were almost three times as likely to identify as Palestinian first (instead of Arab, Muslim or Israeli) than those who did not. They are twice as likely to support Iran’s right to a nuclear program, twice as likely to reject Israel’s defining itself as a “Jewish State” and twice as likely to oppose a loyalty oath to the state of Israel.
For Palestinians in Israel, it is clear that the Nakba still lingers as a major factor, determining their views toward the state that governs them.
In sum, the Nakba and its implications has, since the transformative events of 1948, continued to directly impact the Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state. While Palestinians exist across various borders as refugees, residents or citizens of different states, the Nakba continues to be the tie that binds them. This is not only because of a shared memory from the lives of their grandparents, but also because varying, often harsh, present realities rooted in events of the Nakba can only be relegated to distant memory if a peace, based on justice for the Nakba, can be achieved.
Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Centre in Washington, DC.
Second part no subtitles :
There should be two more parts but I could not find them. If you do, please share !
lundi 14 mai 2012, par La Rédaction
Coming Thursday, May 17, will mark a month to the hunger strike, with over 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails participating in it. As Israel refuses to accept the prisoners’ demands for their basic rights, including humane treatment, many of them face immediate risk of death as the world watches over in silence.
The prisoners have decided to live in dignity or starve to death in their isolation cells, and a global mobilization is urgently needed to break the deafening silence ! A month into the hunger strike, join a
Global 24-hour hunger strike
In front of Israeli embassies, consulates and UN offices
May 17, 2012
Endorse the Palestinian civil society call for a boycott of G4S due to its complicity in Israel’s violations of Palestinian prisoners’ rights
Background
More than two weeks ago, some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners have launched an open-ended hunger strike and their life is in danger. Their demands are simple and the strike’s slogan, echoing through the prison walls, is just as plain- freedom or death. The lives of all prisoners on strike are currently under danger, but among them is a smaller group, which has been striking for a longer period and whose lives are under immediate threat.
Thaer Halahleh and Bilal Diab have not eaten for more than 70 days – since the 29th of February. Israeli courts have rejected their appeals and refused to free them from administrative detention where they remain without charge or trial, subject to secret evidence and secret allegations. They are in critical condition.
Hassan Safadi has been refusing food since the 2nd of March, Omar Abu Shalal, 54, since the 4th of March, Mahmoud Sarsak, the only Gazan to have been incarcerated under Israel’s Illegal Combatants Law, since the 24th of March, Mohammed al-Taj, 40, also since the 24th of March and Ja’afar Ezzadeen, 41, since the 27th of march.
The Prisoners’ key demands include :
Ending the policy of solitary confinement and isolation ;
End to the use of administrative detentions ;
The restoration of visitation rights to families of prisoners from the Gaza Strip, a right that has been denied to all families for more than 6 years ;
Canceling ‘Shalit’ law, which restricts prisoners’ access to educational materials as punitive measure. The law remains intact despite a prisoner swap deal last October ;
Ending systematic humiliation, including arbitrary strip searches, nightly raids and collective punishment.
Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike have been hit hard with retaliation from Israel Prison Services, including beatings, transferring from one prison to another, confiscation of salt (an act that could have severe health consequences for hunger strikers), denial of family and lawyer visits, and isolation and solitary confinement of hunger strikers.
In response, Human Rights Watch issued a statement chiding Israel’s over its administrative detention policy ; it said, “It shouldn’t take the self-starvation of Palestinian prisoners for Israel to realize it is violating their due process rights.” Amnesty International also issued a call for urgent action from individuals around the world to contact Israeli authorities about Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh.
Emphasizing imprisonment as a critical component of Israel’s system of occupation, colonialism and apartheid practiced against the Palestinian people, Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations have called for intensifying the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign to target corporations profiting directly from the Israeli prison system. In particular, we call for action to be taken to hold to account G4S, the world’s largest international security corporation, which helps to maintain and profit from Israel’s prison system, for its complicity with Israeli violations of international law.
Signed :
Popular Struggle Coordinating Committee
Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)
Thaer Halahleh wrote a letter to his wife Shireen from an Israeli jail in February: “My detention has been renewed seven times and they still haven’t charged me. I can’t take it any more.” Then the 34-year-old began a hunger strike, as did Bilal Diab. That was 77 days ago. Both are Palestinians, fathers, whose young daughters are strip searched and terrified when they visit. David Rose, an exceptional investigative journalist and Jewish himself, recently publicised their stories. Eight others have been on the same, silent, self-wasting, wasted protest. Halahleh’s eyes were bleeding, blood instead of tears. He, Diab and others may well be dead by the time you read this. Last Friday, Supreme Court judges in this hubristic democracy turned down an application from civil rights groups to have the men moved to civilian hospitals. They didn’t want, perhaps, their own citizens to witness such stuff. What would that do to the image of the plucky little nation, surrounded by real and imagined threats?
The moralistic Chief Rabbi will not be on “Thought for the Day” expressing sorrow for the treatment of these prisoners. Ardent British Zionists will not be pressed to condemn those responsible for the state barbarism. You certainly won’t get a big TV hit like Homeland, (based on Hatufim, an Israeli TV series that fictionalised the capture by Palestinian militants of the IDF soldier Gilad Shalit) being made about these men. Come on, you cool, edgy TV chaps, how about a film about a handsome Palestinian held by the Israelis till he loses his mind? Do I hear a choral “No”?
Western opinion formers have been indifferent, in some cases knowingly so, about what is happening. No condemnations are heard around our Parliament. They say we must have freedom of speech, but that right is never evoked when it comes to Israel. The BNP and EDL can spread their racist poison freely, but Baroness Jenny Tonge is savaged by Zionists and her own party for saying that nation “is not going to be there forever in its present form”. She has just quit the Lib Dems. If she had uttered the same words about, say, Zimbabwe, she would have been acclaimed.
A large number of enlightened British Jews see the double standards and object to Israel’s intransigence. It must be so hard to do what they do, behave with integrity and empathise with those they are instructed to hate.
The detained Palestinians are embarked on peaceful, Gandhian protest action. They want their families to be able to visit without restrictions, decent medical treatment, not to be put into solitary confinement for years on end, to be taken to court and tried. How is that “terrorism”? With the 1981 IRA hunger strikers, of whom 10 died, even the most anti-Republican British newspapers published pictures and told us what was happening. TV too covered their journeys to the very end.
With these slowly dying inmates and the 6,000 others locked up without due process, there is nothing, nada. I never knew until this week that since 1967, 700,000 Palestinians have been detained. Not all were innocent but nor were all of them guilty. To be a Palestinian, to want equality, rights, freedom and land is not a crime. Except that for hardline Israelis, it is.
Their country is protected from censure partly because of fears that any criticism of its actions is potentially “anti-Semitic”. Some anti-Semites do use Israel as a cover, but then Israel uses that fact to tar and warn all legitimate criticism. Its governments do what they damn-well want and claim perpetual exceptionality. Their darkest deeds are thus left unscrutinised. This time though, it is suddenly dawning on some key people, among them the hapless Middle East saviour Tony Blair, that these “martyrs” could trigger another Intifada. He is urging Israeli officials to “take all measures to prevent a tragic outcome that could have serious implications for stability and security”. Why, he even uttered the words “human rights”. The UN and other bodies have intervened. They will all be rebuffed, so monstrous are the egos of the ultra-right wing leadership. In any case Netanyahu et al can point – and with absolute validity – at Guantanamo Bay and our own prisoners held without trial. They are all in it together.
Blair is right to be fearful. Every time a hunger striker dies, even more inchoately angry young Muslim men will be radicalised and turn murderous. Some are raised in the West filled with rhetoric about freedom, democracy, fairness and justice and then witness the betrayal of Palestinians. That dissonance between principles and reality makes them, perhaps, even more enraged than the Palestinians themselves who have low expectations and few illusions. This is not making excuses for terrorists, it is just a reality check.
I truly want Israel to survive and thrive but it is becoming its own worst enemy. British activist Tom Hurndall, 21, was sheltering a Palestinian child from Israeli bullets in Gaza in 2003, when he was killed. His candid journals have just been published. Read them and mourn the idealistic young man and the loss of all idealism in Israel.
N.Z. at Walls
We Syrian are at a crossroad. Syrians have proved after 14 months that they do not think in sectarian terms. But make no mistake, the bad and the ugly are working slowly but surely. Reuters today: “Syrian troops … overran a rebellious Sunni Muslim village west of the city of Hama” Just read how Reuters chose to word its news. The west is eager to turn the legitimate struggle against dictatorship into a sectarian struggle. For some it was clear. The gulf countries are part and parcel in this dirty game, as evil as Assad and his regime. Syrians who are hymning either the first or the latter are spreading the fire. The likes of Narwine Sharmini are plenty, to stir the Syrian agenda in certain direction, sectarian one. There are many like her. They are not in the resistance camp, nor pro Palestinians, they are the stirrer of hell on earth. Those thousands of noble men did not want to die, they were murdered for wanting dignity and social justice for all Syrians. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain….are autocratic ruling government, they know they are next in line..perhaps that is why it is in the interest of all greedy nations to elongate our struggle for freedom. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/13/us-syria-killings-idUSBRE84C04E20120513
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