Yitzhak Shamir on Spitting Image back in the day

I found this on youtube just now. It's Spitting Image doing Yitzhak Shamir, the former Israeli Prime Minister, on BBC's Mastermind where contestants choose a specialist subject to answer questions on.

The programme ran from 1984 to 1996 and Shamir was Israel's PM from 1983 to 1984 and then again from 1986 to 1992.  I'm guessing this programme went out some time in the early 1990s when apartheid still ruled in South Africa and the intifada was in full swing in Palestine.

Spitting Image was enormously popular in the UK and it's not surprising it has a lengthy Wikipedia entry. What is surprising is that this Shamir Mastermind appearance doesn't warrant a mention in the Spitting Image entry's International Politicians section:

Spitting Image lampooned US President Ronald Reagan (voiced by Frank Welker in the Ronnie and Nancy special) as a bumbling, nuke-obsessed fool in comparison with his advisors Edwin Meese andCaspar Weinberger. Next to his bed were red buttons labelled 'Nuke' and 'Nurse'. His wife Nancy was the butt of cosmetic surgery jokes.

Mikhail Gorbachev had his forehead birthmark in the shape of hammer and sickle. All other Russians looked like Leonid Brezhnev, often said "da" ("yes") and talked about potatoes. In Russia it was snowing even indoors and the Soviet television had extremely low-tech visual effects.

François Mitterrand was wearing a beret and a garlic wreath. P. W. Botha was shown as a racist cleverly disguising his views (once he had a badge "anti-anti-apartheid"). Adolf Hitler incognito had a house at9 Downing Street. Some appearances were also made by Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Ruhollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

Other international caricatures included Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger; George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle; Konstantin Chernenko, Raisa Gorbachova and Boris Yeltsin.

No mention of Shamir. As it happens I couldn't imagine that piece appearing on UK mainstream television today what with comparing Israel unfavourably to apartheid South Africa and all but surely that makes it even more worthy of mention.

Israel doesn't kill stone throwers...not on camera anyway

Here's a turn up in YNET.  Israeli soldiers in the West Bank were confronted by stone-throwers.

A video that surfaced over the weekend shows Palestinians stoning Israeli security forces, eventually forcing them to run for cover - similiar to the incident in Hebron.
Six IDF soldiers equipped with shields and crowd-dispersal means found themselves ambushed by a crowd of stone throwing Palestinians in the West Bank village of Kafr Qaddum. YNET people spoke to "S" and "T":

According to S., orders to open fire address situations of a clear and present danger and only if there is a person with the means and intent to kill. "But what is an angry mob throwing stones and sometimes rocks at you if not a life threatening situation?

I wouldn't order opening fire at a crowd of people but we can't have a situation where you stand in front of a person with a rock and start to ask yourself is this person life threatening. If I shoot at him I go to jail."

T's testimony was a tad more telling:

T., a combatant in an infantry brigade, also claims that soldiers are not equipped to handle the complex situation on the ground. "There's nothing more humiliating for a combatant than to see his friends run," he says.

He criticizes the army for sending such a small group of soldiers to Qaddum on Friday at a particularly volatile time.

T. says the cameras on the ground undermine the forces' efforts. "A commander or an officer sees a camera and becomes a diplomat, calculating every rubber bullet, every step. It's intolerable, we're left utterly exposed. The cameras are our kryptonite."

I see, so cameras are a constraint.  I don't know how Freudian the guy was being regarding kryptonite.  It's the only thing that can kill Superman.  Does this Israeli soldier really think that not being able to kill is the same thing as actually being dead?

100 years of non-violent Palestinian resistance

I picked up a freebie issue of Time magazine yesterday and I was surprised to see a letter on non-violent Palestinian resistance.

I'm copying it out as it appears on page 10 of the 2 May 2011 edition because the letters aren't available on line:

Nonviolence among Palestinians is not new.

The recently released book Popular Resistance

in Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh, documents

over 100 years of everyday acts of resis-

tance, with suicide bombings and rocket

attacks as the exception.  The world needs

to hear more about these courageous acts.

Peggy Vander Meulen,

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH, US. 

The book is available from Pluto Press.

Who learned what from whom?

I got a text yesterday telling me that I'd had a letter published in The Independent so I bought a copy. Here's what I was responding to:

Ian McEwan was absolutely right to criticise Jewish settlements on the West Bank (News, 21 February) when receiving his literary prize in Jerusalem. Hopefully the emerging democracies in the Arab world will soon be able to emulate Israel's openness.

Stan Labovitch

Windsor

Here's what I wrote:

Stan Labovitch seems not to have noticed that across the Arab world people have already found something to emulate in Palestine.  From where else did this generation learn the art of intifada?

And here's what they published:

Art of intifada is catching

Stan Labovitch hopes that Arabs will soon be able to emulate Israeli democracy (letter, 23 February). He seems not to have noticed that across the Arab world people have already found something to emulate in Palestine. From where else did this generation learn the art of intifada?

Mark Elf, Dagenham, Essex

Nice headline of its own but I rarely call the zionist occupation of Palestine "Israeli democracy".  Still there is one good thing.  You see how I italicised the word intifada? Well The Independent didn't see fit to do that. That means that for them the word "intifada" has now passed into the English language and that is good news.