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“Let me explain that very briefly. Sometimes, because we deal so much at least which you know so much about, we have to remember how we got here. Remember, it was Ehud Barak who decided to pull all Iraqi troops — I mean, excuse me, all Iraqi — all Israeli troops out of Gaza. He did that back in `06.”
Joe Biden, VP USA
Ariel Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan, adopted by the government on June 6, 2004 and enacted in August 2005, to evict all Israelis from the Gaza Strip and from four settlements in the northern West Bank.
Question: What is the connection between the Freedom Flotilla — which was inspected thoroughly by Turkish authorities before heading to sea — and “dozens of tons of weapons destined by Hamas, destined by Iran, for Gaza” and a supposed quest by Iran for a “Mediterranean port a few dozen kilometres from Tel Aviv and from Jerusalem”? Also there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, no shortage of food and no shortage of medical supplies.
Netanyahu even invokes the “flawed” UN Goldstone report in speech
(NY Times) – Israeli officials quickly responded to a legal challenge by reserve officers asking the Supreme Court to hold the prisoners for prosecution. With hundreds of detained activists waiting in Ben-Gurion International Airport to board planes sent by Turkey and Greece to take them home, Israel’s attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, wrote to the court saying that the decision was based on “clear diplomatic interests touching on the state of Israel’s foreign relations and national security.”
Activists Overpowered First Commandos …
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Al Jazeera had its own camera crews travelling on the Gaza aid convoy, but all of the video they shot has been confiscated by Israeli authorities. There is no word on when – or if – the pictures might be released.
Israel has been releasing its own video – which supports the Israeli version of events, and contradicts the reports of many witnesses.
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The American Israel Public Affairs Committee welcomed the statements from Biden, Hoyer and Cantor.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
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(AJR) – Bennett says the chairman, Michael Goldblatt, told her the organization was going to continue its efforts to hurt the [Philadelphia] Inquirer economically, while the president, Leonard Getz, laid down the terms for ending the ZOA’s boycott. “He said Israel was the victim, and that we should approach all stories from this perspective,” Bennett says. “And if we did this, they would call off the boycott, and our circulation would rise.”
The delegation also presented Bennett with a scathing report on her brief tenure titled “New Era but the Same Errors: The Philadelphia Inquirer’s coverage of the Middle East in the first 60 days of the Amanda Bennett Era.”
As Bennett and others covering the conflict have discovered, they have been plunged into a kind of proxy war for the one raging between Israel and the Palestinians. The American version is fought with e-mails, threatening phone calls, demonstrations and pressure on advertisers, but to the people on the receiving end, the struggle seems as toxic and never-ending as the real thing.
“There’s no place in the world that causes as much misery for a journalist,” says syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who writes frequently about the Middle East. “The Arabs get extremely angry if you’re not on their side. The Israelis get enraged if you’re not 1,000 percent on their side. You just can’t please anyone.”
HONEST REPORTING BY SHRAGA SIMMONS
Pro-Israeli Web sites, which are better staffed and funded, generate about 10 times as much mail as pro-Arab sites, editors say. They note, too, that the volume waxes and wanes depending on the level of violence. (See “Days of Rage,” July/August 2002.) After an event like the March assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas, monitoring sites go into overdrive.
HonestReporting.com, a pro-Israeli pressure group, lambasted news outlets for calling the sheikh a spiritual leader rather than a terrorist, while Palestine Media Watch (pmwatch.com) put out an “action call” headed “Don’t let U.S. media whitewash Sheikh’s assassination.”
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Frequently, these so-called media monitors, who say they are only interested in fairness and balance, will seize on a word or a phrase and leave out the context. Take the case of a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial that called both PLO leader Yassir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “pigheaded and destructive.” In a communiqué urging readers to complain to the Inquirer, HonestReporting.com omitted the reference to Arafat to make the editorial sound like a one-sided attack on Sharon.
Israeli lobby groups in the States don’t know how to react. Several papers, including The Independent, have been bombarded by hundreds of letters and e-mails from supposedly outraged American “readers” most of them from parts of the United States where The Independent, for example, is not on sale and many of them written in vitriolic, even violent language. A number have been written in answer to an appeal from an outfit called “honestreporting.com“, which carries a series of misleading and, in some cases, untruthful statements about my own articles.
They are balanced, however, by large numbers of letters and e-mails asking why the American press doesn’t give the full coverage of events found in The Independent and other European newspapers.
“The sarcastic use of “suicide activists” is really non-productive, as many will not see the sarcastic nature of it, and start the common use of it.”
Since 2006 Israel has limited the import of various goods to the Hamas-controlled
territory to a "humanitarian minimum". (The Economist)
Cross-posted from Karmafish‘s propaganda piece.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Anyone who defends this barbarous policy is inhuman. Period.
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Indeed one of many thoughtful articles one can find in Haaretz newspaper. In many of my diaries on the I/P issue I find support from Haaretz journalists and opinion writers. I imagine it’s political corruption and money flow from corporations and charities that surpass legal taxation bounds to hold Israelis captive. The single fact of using the Shoa as a PR piece across the western world keeps a false victimhood of today’s state of Israel and its government of thugs.
(Haaretz) – Israel is in thrall to a destructive, vicious cycle, like that of a drug addict or a violent man, which repeats itself (with some variations) at every turn. Each time the cycle becomes shorter, and a suicidal ending seems inevitable at the moment.
It happens like this: Israel uses immense force to attack an immeasurably smaller and weaker entity, which it perceives as nothing less than a dangerous enemy threatening its existence. By attacking, Israel inflicts huge damage to many people, among them the innocent or the presumed innocent, and causes itself enormous damage because the world is furious at it.
Israel once again feels threatened and defends itself by further entrenchment – physical, military and diplomatic. All proposals for change are seen as a threat, and Israel does its best to reject them.
The Jewish people in Zion has in the past been the victim of horrific violence. Israel today is captive to a false sense of victimhood, which goes together with both a sense of false omnipotence and guilt-cum-aggressiveness.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."