Steven Speilberg’s Munich has already generated considerable controversy. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks said that Spielberg presents a “perpetual motion machine” of violence and that he ignores the “evil” involved—presumably meaning the Palestinians. The right-wing organization, CAMERA, is aghast that Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner depict Palestinians as people rather than as mindless killers. At Jewish Voice for Peace, we work for a lasting and just peace that respects the rights of Israelis and Palestinians equally. We do that by working to change American policy in the region and by raising a Jewish call for policies that treat Israelis and Palestinians equally within the framework of international law.They seem to quite like the film for what they see as balance and for entertainment value. I found the review annoyingly "balanced" and I still need to see the film before I can comment.
One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers.He's got some stuff about the wall, I mean fence, too but please read the whole thing.
"I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore."....
This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" — or even, in some cases, "outposts."....
"occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land.....
The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.
If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act.
Islam is growing "like a canker" in the UK through "unrestrained and irresponsible breeding".I had to look up "canker". It's not a nice thing to say. But it gets worse.
The magazine also published an article endorsing the rightwing populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, and described immigrants as "ill educated and culturally estranged Third Worlders".
Galha's executive committee said the magazine's editor and deputy editor had been forced to resign over the comments, published in the autumn issue, and the magazine had been relaunched under a new editorial team. "We've done everything we can to rectify the situation," said the secretary of Galha, George Broadhead.Actually from their website they also say that Christianity and Orthodox Judaism are homophobic. But most of their ire is reserved for Islam and there is no analysis of homophobia in Judaism.
The group has renounced the comments about immigrants and immigration, which Mr Broadhead admitted could be "regarded as potentially racist". However, he said he stood by the remarks about Muslims and Islam.
Mr Broadhead wrote in the magazine: "What is wrong with being fearful of Islam? (There is a lot to fear) ... What does a moderate Muslim do, other than excuse the real nutters by adhering to this barmy doctrine?"
He described his article as "slightly over the top in wording maybe but basically we're saying Islam is homophobic".
"People are attempting to silence and even ban Jewish societies on campuses on the grounds that Jews must support the state of Israel, therefore they should be banned, which is quite extraordinary because ... British Jews see themselves as British citizens. So it's that kind of feeling that you don't know what's going to happen next that's making ... some European Jewish communities uncomfortable."It's "quite extraordinary" to assume that Jewish Societies should be identified as supporting Israel? I don't know of any Jewish Societies that have been threatened or considered for an actual ban on campus here but I do know that the World Union of Jewish Students is an affiliate of the World Zionist Organisation and I have read in the Jewish Chronicle that the Union of Jewish Students has two seats on the World Zionist Congress, the policy making body of the World Zionist Organisation. Is it now the case that it's anti-semitic to assume that zionists support the State of Israel? And if so, what is a zionist?
The BoD are defiant however, claiming Interpal have not scored a victory. The Board's Director, Jon Benjamin has had this to say:And me."The case was not tried and tested in court. Despite the way the story has been spun by Interpal, the settlement was not a victory for either side."Hang on. The BoD called Interpal "a terrorist organisation". Interpal begin libel proceedings against BoD. BoD say they shouldn't have called Interpal "a terrorist organisation". Sounds like a victory to me.
The Board of Deputies and the UK-registered charity Interpal announce that they have reached an out-of-court settlement of libel proceedings relating to an item published by the Board on this website in September 2003. In the item, we referred to “terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Interpal”. We would like to make it clear that we should not have described Interpal in this way and we regret the upset and distress our item caused.
"This is all a kind of tsunami of anti-Semitism which is taking place a long way from this country but (of) which Europe seems unaware," he said.To use the word "tsunami" so close to the first anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami goes to show just how self-indulgent some zionists have become in their misuse of anti-semitism to cover for the crimes of Israel.
However, in a letter from the Joint Council of Christian and Jews signed by Sir Jonathan, he acknowledges the role the Middle East conflict plays in boosting anti-Semitism.So what's the Chief Rabbi doing to achieve "peace, justice and reconciliation in the Holy Land"?
The statement from January 2004 read: "Achieving peace, justice and reconciliation in the Holy Land would help to make it harder for anti-Semitism to flourish."
By paying up without caveat, donors in effect relieve Israel of its obligations under international law. As the occupying power, Israel must deliver assistance and services to the Palestinian population. As high contracting parties to the Geneva conventions, the donors are obliged to ensure Israel's compliance with the law. None of this has happened. Instead, international aid has rendered the occupation cost-free. It has even enriched Israel's economy: according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, for every dollar produced in the occupied territories, 45 cents flows back to Israel.She also claims that the kidnapping of aid workers is explained by the politics of aid distribution. This is also the theme of an article by Said Ghazali in today's Independent.[pay per view!]
It is an image that resists any attempt to throw it into the denial pile: the specter of Jews surviving the Holocaust only to go hungry in Israel.I'm sure that according to Norman Finkelstein, the Holocaust Industry had raised, not just millions but billions. Where is it all?
If it has done nothing else, the current election campaign has focused the public's radar on social problems which have gone unaddressed for years.
Every day, it seems, the human needs of unheralded Israelis come to light in a shocking new way. The case in point Thursday was the finding that some 40 percent of Holocaust survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line.
There are nearly 400,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel, the nation with the largest population of survivors anywhere. Moreover, the medical and thus the financial needs of the population are growing, as even the youngest of the survivors are now well over 60.
The problem is particularly acute for about 170,000 who moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union over the past decade, and are now living in poverty. They are entitled neither to the monthly pensions sent other surviviors by the governments of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, nor the pensions supplied by Israeli and international Jewish organizations.
All of them arrived past the age of 65, and many are living alone in a nation whose inner workings are difficult to contend with even for the native-born and the young.
The Knesset has allocated millions to the fund, but much more assistance is urgently needed. The survivors may still have a few things to their name, but time is not one of them.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, has been trying to expose the government's complicity with the Uzbek regime in obtaining information through the use of torture. Two documents in particular are being suppressed, because the FCO has instructed Mr Murray not to include them in his new book and to hand over all copies - fortunately, however, they have already made their way into the public domain by some means. And I, of course, have received no instructions from any official. Here they are:Well, there one is. The other one is here.
This movie could easily have been a paid Israeli advertisement for its killing machine. In fact, it could be a recruitment movie for Israeli killing squads. I mean that. In fact, it is a celebretary movie of Israeli murder of Palestinians. Israel killing is always moral, and always careful, and always on target.....On victims and perpetrators:
the movie was based on a book that took the Israeli account as it was delivered. But the book was honest and more accurate at least on one count: in the book by George Jonas titled Vengeance (only Israelis are entitled to vengeance as you know, the more violent the better as far as some US movie audiences are concerned), the killers did not express regret or second-thoughts. None. In the book but not in the movie, the killers, according to Jonas, had "absolutely no qualms about anything they did." How could Spielberg miss that.........
The first victim of the movie was Wa’il Zu`aytir, and I knew his niece; I went to school with Abu Hasan Salamah’s son--he was younger; and I knew the street and building where the three PLO leaders were massacred in Beirut. And let me tell you that NONE of the five people mentioned here had anything to do with Munich--but more on that later. NONE. But why should this movie, a Spielberg’s movie for potato’s sake, bother with facts, especially if they come in the way of a smooth pro-Israeli narrative?The small picture and the big picture:
It can be argued that the Palestinian attackers risked the lives of the hostages by taking them hostages, even if they did not intend to kill them. That is true. This is like hijacking: the hijackers, any hijackers, are responsible, and should be held responsible for whatever endangerment to the lives and health of victims. That is true. But it is also true that the State of Israel has taken a nation as a hostage, and has been endangering the lives of Palestinians since the inception of the state of Israel. This is why it is all a question of who is retaliating against whom?Israelis human, Palestinians sub-human:
we had to see the head Israeli killer with his child: you need to see him as a human being. Do you know that not a single Palestinian in the movie appeared unarmed?As I said I'll have to see the film. But please read the whole post at The Angry Arab News Service. It's none to easy on the eye as there are no paragraphs in a long piece but it's worth persevering with. Also, so far the post has generated 459 comments.
If the Palestinian Arabs were constant in their antipathy toward Zionism, this did not usually take the form of hostility to Jewish immigration. Yapp points out that "From 1923 to 1926, a period when many Jews entered Palestine, the country was quiet. In 1929, at a time when Jewish immigration was at an all time low, the most serious riots until that time occurred." Often, the immediate cause of hostility to the arriving Jews was the disappropriation of fellaheen, while a more generalised hostility to Zionism had developed among Palestinians, and particularly in the Arab press. The opposition to Zionism was not delimited by class, but different layers of Palestinian society responded to it differently.That Lenin must have got some good books for Christmas.
Rashid Khalidi, in his efforts to demonstrate that there was a coherent Palestinian identity long before the Zionists’ comprehensive victory in 1948, discloses that most of those who sold their land to the Zionists prior to 1948 were non-Palestinian absentee landlords for whom it was no more than a mere economic transaction. However, David Hirst points out that a large number of Palestinian political leaders did sell their land to the Zionists and were met with no more than verbal abuse – often hypocritical abuse at that, since many of those who waxed indignant about it had indulged in the practise themselves.
Further, as Khalidi acknowledges, there was a clear class dimension involved in the land sales, which intersected with the national dimension: the fellaheen were least inclined to sell their land to the Zionists, while large landowners were most inclined to do so. Class was also an important dimension in the relationship between Arab and Jewish workers: if the Arab antipathy to Zionism and the anti-Arab practises of the Histradut (Zionist trade union) weren’t enough to prevent solidarity where it might otherwise have taken place, the generally privileged position of migrant Jews in the economy made it even more improbable. And if it is true, as Khalidi suggests, that most of those who sold their land to Zionists were non-Palestinian, it is also true that many of those who joined in Palestinian uprisings, especially in 1936, were non-Palestinians. The inspiration for the uprising derived, to some extent, from similar disturbances in Egypt and Syria, and there was considerable popular pressure on the semi-autonomous governments of those countries to support the Palestinian struggle.
Palestinian nationalism was both contiguous with and often surpassed by Arab nationalism. Nevertheless, the refusal of large numbers of the domestic elite to sell their land to Zionists was an important element binding the emerging political leadership with the masses of peasant workers. And it adverted to the increasingly widespread recognition that Palestine would be a separate national state, formalised at the Third Arab Congress at Haifa in 1920. If it was the fellaheen who initiated and drove the anti-British and anti-Zionist insurgency, the notable families and elites that made up the more conservative Arab leadership were if nothing else obliged by pressure to remonstrate with the British rulers in militant language.
we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.I wonder if they'll get any letters over that Buchenwald line. Let's just see.
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
On Sunday morning of last week Mahmoud Shawara, a laborer, mounted his mule and set out from his home in the village of Nuaman to look for work in the neighboring village of Umm Touba. At about 9 A.M., he was arrested by a Border Police unit that detains workers who do not have an entry permit to Israel every morning.
The Border Police ordered Shawara to get into their jeep. He refused. He did not want to leave his mule unattended. At 9:30 his brother saw him for the last time, healthy and sound. At 4 P.M. a resident of Umm Touba named Mohammed Hamadan noticed a mule galloping toward the village and dragging something behind it. From a distance, Hamadan thought it might be scrap metal. As the mule came closer, Hamadan saw that it was dragging an injured, battered man. The mule, he says, was galloping down the slope and looked frightened. He stopped the animal and then discovered that the person being dragged across the ground was Mahmoud Shawara, from the neighboring village, whom he knew well. Shawara`s left hand was roped to the mule`s neck. He was unconscious and barely breathing. His skull and face were smashed on the left side and blood was pouring from him. He managed to utter a few broken, unclear words or parts of words and then stopped breathing.
A British UN project manager shot by an Israeli sniper was unlawfully killed, a UK inquest has concluded.This killing of a British UN worker by Israel has been treated as an official secret by the government and I don't recall anything on the broadcast news about it. I checked some UK ex-broadsheets for news of this and only the Times seems to cover it. The Telegraph, Guardian and Independent have all ignored it, unless, like me, they missed it first time round.
Iain Hook, 54, of Felixstowe, Suffolk, was in a UN compound in Jenin when he was shot in November 2002.
On Friday, jurors unanimously agreed Mr Hook, who was born in Essex, had been the victim of a "deliberate" killing.
