Category Archives: Issues

Inside the most insanely pro-Israel meeting you could ever attend

David Weigel describes scenes in this year’s Christians United for Israel conference in Washington: Over two boisterous days, the only speaker who brought the crowd to silence was Sgt. Benjamin Anthony, an Israel Defense Forces veteran whose organization Our Soldiers Speak sent him to campuses and other hot zones to describe the reality in Israel.

“There is an entire generation being raised in southern Israel, barely any of whom do not suffer from PTSD due to the rocket fire,” said Anthony. “The entire Zionist experiment rests in no small part on what it is we do during this campaign.”

What the IDF needed was a total victory. “Rocket factories can be destroyed,” said Anthony. “Weapon factories can be destroyed. Terrorists can be eliminated. Tunnels can be dug out.” But it could only happen if America resisted the temptation to criticize Israel or to stop the operation.

“Hamas started this war,” said Anthony. “The soldiers of Israel must smash their skulls and break their spines.”

When he said that, a standing-room crowd of pastors and activists and politicians rose to its feet, waving the twin flags of the countries God loved.

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U.S. airlines determine it’s not safe to operate flights to Israel

Adam Chandler: The Associated Press is reporting that Delta has decided to indefinitely suspend all of its flights to Israel amid rocket fire from Gaza upon the nearby Tel Aviv area and, most recently, the area surrounding Israel’s lone international airport.

Delta Air Lines is canceling all flights to Israel until further notice, citing reports that a rocket landed near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.


The precedent set by Delta’s decision could potentially cripple Israel’s economy.


Throughout decades of peace negotiations, the greatest fear about an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank was that it would place its only international airport in the crosshairs of rocket fire. But in the past two weeks, Hamas has unveiled rockets capable of firing greater distances, allowing it to target cities once unfathomable to Israeli security forces, including its largest city, Tel Aviv. [Continue reading…]

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Israel, not Hamas, orchestrated the latest conflict in Gaza

Musa al-Gharbi writes: In the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, the dominant discourse is that the Palestinian militants provoked the hostilities — while Israel, as President Barack Obama affirmed last week, is acting in legitimate self-defense. Many have attempted to problematize this narrative, for instance by arguing that Israel, as an occupying power, does not have a legitimate legal or moral claim to self-defense. Others have argued that rockets fired by Hamas do not constitute an existential crisis for Israel or its citizens and certainly did not warrant the killing of more than 500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including women and children.

While these are all valid and important points, the broader narrative remains largely unchallenged: Hamas began firing rockets at Israel first, triggering Israel’s latest military incursion. This is not true. In fact, far from acting in self-defense, the crisis is the result of deliberate actions by Israel over the last few weeks — first to stir up anti-Arab sentiment among the Israeli population and then to provoke Hamas into open conflict.

The current escalation began with the abduction of three teenage Israeli settlers from the West Bank. The fact that the three were settlers is an important detail that is often passed over far too quickly or overlooked altogether. The settlements, what they represent and how the settlers interact with the Palestinian population form a critical part of the episode’s context.

After the kidnapping, for more than two weeks Israeli authorities put on a show of looking for the missing settlers — the whole time whipping up anti-Arab sentiment, raising hopes of a recovery and marginalizing voices of dissent. When the abductees were found murdered, the Israeli public was outraged and demanded vengeance. Shortly after the funerals for the youths, another group of Israeli settlers beat and burned to death a 16-year-old Palestinian teen, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. This incident was followed by a brutal assault on Tariq Khdeir, a 15-year-old U.S. citizen and cousin of Mohammed’s by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s foreign policy and the future of the Middle East

Speaking in Washington DC on Monday afternoon, Chas Freeman said: In April, our four-decade-long effort to broker a secure and accepted place for a Jewish state in the Middle East sputtered to a disgraceful end. In the tragicomic final phase of the so-called “peace process,” instead of mediating, the United States negotiated with Israel about the terms of Palestinian capitulation, not with the Palestinians about self-determination. The U.S. effort to broker peace for Israel is now not just dead but so putrid it can’t be shown at a wake. Israel didn’t believe in it, so it killed it. May it rest in peace.

From the outset, Israel used the “peace process” as a distraction while it created facts on the ground in the form of illegal settlements. Israeli expansionism and related policies have now made Israel’s peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians– and, thus, with Israel’s Arab neighbors – impossible. The United States created the moral hazard that enabled Israel to put itself in this ultimately untenable position. Forty years of one-sided American diplomacy aimed at achieving regional and international acceptance for Israel have thus perversely produced the very opposite – increasing international isolation and opprobrium for the Jewish state.

We will now “cover Israel’s back” at the United Nations as its ongoing maltreatment and intermittent muggings of its captive Arab population complete its international delegitimization and ostracism. We will pay a heavy political price for this stand globally, in the Middle East, and very likely in escalating terrorism against Americans abroad and at home. It may satisfy our sense of honor. But it more closely resembles assisted suicide than a strategy for the survival of Israel and our own position in the Middle East. [Continue reading…]

Freeman spoke at the Middle East Policy Council, preceded by Kenneth Pollack, Paul Pillar, and Amin Tarzi — the 77th Capitol Hill Conference can be viewed here.

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Why John Kerry’s Israel-Palestine peace plan failed

The New Republic reports: The depth of Palestinian alienation became clear to Kerry and his team only on February 19, when the two sides met for dinner at Le Maurice Hotel in Paris — the kickoff to a three-day parley. As the Palestinians walked in the door, each American was struck with the same thought: These guys do not look like they’re in a good mood. Following dinner, Kerry met alone with Abbas while [the Palestinians’ chief negotiator Saeb] Erekat and [Kerry’s envoy to the talks, Martin] Indyk spoke in a separate room. Afterward, Kerry and Indyk got in the car that would take them to their rooms at the Grande Hotel. The secretary turned to his envoy: “That was really negative.” At around the same time, Abbas, who was nursing a terrible cold, saw Erekat in the hall and told him that he was going straight to sleep. “It was a difficult meeting,” he said. “I’ll brief you tomorrow.”

The next morning, at around 7:30, Indyk called Erekat. “The secretary wants to see you,” he said. Erekat was surprised at the early time of the summons. This must be important. He put on a suit and took a cab to the Grande. When he and Indyk got to Kerry’s Louis XIII-style suite, the secretary answered the door. He was dressed casually: hotel slippers, no jacket or tie. He looked concerned. After a moment of silence, the first words came out of Kerry’s mouth. “Why is Abu Mazen so angry with me?”

Erekat responded that he hadn’t yet been briefed on the meeting, so Kerry offered to get his notes. “I barely said a word, and he started saying, ‘I cannot accept this,’” Kerry grumbled, going through some of Abbas’s red lines.

“What do you want?” Erekat said. “These are his positions. We are sick and tired of Bibi the Great. He’s taking you for a ride.”

“No one takes me for a ride!”

“He is refusing to negotiate on a map or even say 1967.”

“I’ve moved him,” Kerry said, “I’ve moved him.”

“Where?” Erekat said, raising his voice. “Show me! This is just the impression he’s giving you.”

The next month, Abbas led a Palestinian delegation to Washington. At a March 16 lunch at Kerry’s Georgetown home, the secretary asked Abbas if he’d accept delaying the fourth prisoner release by a few days. Kerry was worried that the Israelis were wavering. “No,” Abbas said. “I cannot do this.” Abbas would later describe that moment as a turning point. If the Americans can’t convince Israel to give me 26 prisoners, he thought then, how will they ever get them to give me East Jerusalem? At the meal, Erekat noticed Abbas displaying some of his telltale signs of discomfort. He was crossing his legs, looking over at him every two minutes. The index cards on which he normally took notes had been placed back in his suit pocket. Abbas was no longer interested in what was being said.

The next day at the White House, Obama tried his luck with the Palestinian leader. He reviewed the latest American proposals, some of which had been tilted in Abbas’s direction. (The document would now state categorically that there would be a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.) “Don’t quibble with this detail or that detail,” Obama said. “The occupation will end. You will get a Palestinian state. You will never have an administration as committed to that as this one.” Abbas and Erekat were not impressed.

After the meeting, the Palestinian negotiator saw Susan Rice — Abbas’s favorite member of the Obama administration — in the hall. “Susan,” he said, “I see we’ve yet to succeed in making it clear to you that we Palestinians aren’t stupid.” Rice couldn’t believe it. “You Palestinians,” she told him, “can never see the fucking big picture.” [Continue reading…]

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Why Israel is losing the social media war over Gaza

Paul Mason at Channel 4 News sees “evidence of a massive change in the balance of power between social media and the old, hierarchical media channels we used to rely on to understand wars.”

Specifically social media has the power to do three things: first, to show people reality – or a version of it – independent of what TV networks show. Second, and I think just as important, journalists on the ground are using social media to report, necessarily short-circuiting the normal editorial processes that used to filter what they said. Third, to get into your real life consciousness much more powerfully than the old media.

Let’s work through each of these new powers and understand their impact. In a society where the media is supposed to observe balance and impartiality, getting real-time access to corroborated facts independently of TV stations is not so revolutionary.

But modern-day America is not one of those countries. Its media is traditionally heavily skewed towards the pro-Israeli view. My colleague, Matt Frei, tweeted that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interview with Netanyahu was less a grilling more “a warm bath and a back rub”. Others used more profane metaphors.

But now, for the first time in a major Arab-Israeli conflict, the American public has other sources of reality. All research says that young people everywhere regard Twitter as essentially a news service, and via your social network you can easily get served up words and pictures more impactful than anything on TV. By the time many Americans woke up on Sunday, these pictures were of dead Palestinian children.

Netanyahu complained the Hamas strategy was to provide “telegenically dead” people: but where Israel is losing the hearts and minds of the world is not via “tele” anything: it is in the JPEGs that stream into millions of people’s mobile phones every time they glance at the object in the palm of their hand.

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Jewish businesses in Paris are being looted and destroyed by protesters over Israel Gaza offensive

AFP reports: France’s interior minister Monday slammed “intolerable” acts of anti-Semitism after a rally against Israel’s Gaza offensive descended into violence pitting an angry pro-Palestinian crowd against local Jewish businesses.

Sunday’s demonstration in the north Paris suburb of Sarcelles was the third to deteriorate in a week, as shops were looted and riot police lobbed tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowd.

The rally had been banned amid concern the Jewish community would be targeted after protesters last weekend tried to storm two synagogues in Paris.

“When you head for the synagogue, when you burn a corner shop because it is Jewish-owned, you are committing an anti-Semitic act,” Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters outside the Sarcelles synagogue.

In the Paris suburb sometimes nicknamed “little Jerusalem” for its large community of Sephardic Jews, the rally descended into chaos when dozens of youth — some masked — set fire to bins and lit firecrackers and smoke bombs.

Eighteen people were arrested after looters wrecked shops, including a kosher foodstore and a funeral home as protesters shouted: “Fuck Israel!”. [Continue reading…]

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How Russian hackers stole the Nasdaq

Bloomberg Businessweek reports: In October 2010, a Federal Bureau of Investigation system monitoring U.S. Internet traffic picked up an alert. The signal was coming from Nasdaq. It looked like malware had snuck into the company’s central servers. There were indications that the intruder was not a kid somewhere, but the intelligence agency of another country. More troubling still: When the U.S. experts got a better look at the malware, they realized it was attack code, designed to cause damage.

As much as hacking has become a daily irritant, much more of it crosses watch-center monitors out of sight from the public. The Chinese, the French, the Israelis — and many less well known or understood players — all hack in one way or another. They steal missile plans, chemical formulas, power-plant pipeline schematics, and economic data. That’s espionage; attack code is a military strike. There are only a few recorded deployments, the most famous being the Stuxnet worm. Widely believed to be a joint project of the U.S. and Israel, Stuxnet temporarily disabled Iran’s uranium-processing facility at Natanz in 2010. It switched off safety mechanisms, causing the centrifuges at the heart of a refinery to spin out of control. Two years later, Iran destroyed two-thirds of Saudi Aramco’s computer network with a relatively unsophisticated but fast-spreading “wiper” virus. One veteran U.S. official says that when it came to a digital weapon planted in a critical system inside the U.S., he’s seen it only once — in Nasdaq.

The October alert prompted the involvement of the National Security Agency, and just into 2011, the NSA concluded there was a significant danger. A crisis action team convened via secure videoconference in a briefing room in an 11-story office building in the Washington suburbs. Besides a fondue restaurant and a CrossFit gym, the building is home to the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), whose mission is to spot and coordinate the government’s response to digital attacks on the U.S. They reviewed the FBI data and additional information from the NSA, and quickly concluded they needed to escalate.

Thus began a frenzied five-month investigation that would test the cyber-response capabilities of the U.S. and directly involve the president. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, under pressure to decipher a complex hack, struggled to provide an even moderately clear picture to policymakers. After months of work, there were still basic disagreements in different parts of government over who was behind the incident and why. “We’ve seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges, I’ll put it that way, and it’s not crystal clear what their final objective is,” says House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, who agreed to talk about the incident only in general terms because the details remain classified. “The bad news of that equation is, I’m not sure you will really know until that final trigger is pulled. And you never want to get to that.”

Bloomberg Businessweek spent several months interviewing more than two dozen people about the Nasdaq attack and its aftermath, which has never been fully reported. Nine of those people were directly involved in the investigation and national security deliberations; none were authorized to speak on the record. “The investigation into the Nasdaq intrusion is an ongoing matter,” says FBI New York Assistant Director in Charge George Venizelos. “Like all cyber cases, it’s complex and involves evidence and facts that evolve over time.”

While the hack was successfully disrupted, it revealed how vulnerable financial exchanges—as well as banks, chemical refineries, water plants, and electric utilities—are to digital assault. One official who experienced the event firsthand says he thought the attack would change everything, that it would force the U.S. to get serious about preparing for a new era of conflict by computer. He was wrong. [Continue reading…]

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Why Israel is losing the American media war

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: Earlier this month, the IDF’s twitter feed had been full of images of besieged Israelis. But by this weekend Israel was so clearly losing the public relations war that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complained to reporters, tersely, that Hamas uses “telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause.”

If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them. But his complaint is in itself a concession. The story of the conflict between Israel and Palestine looks a little bit different this time around. Social media have helped allow us to see more deeply inside war zones — in this case, inside Gaza, and allowed viewers much fuller access to the terror that grips a population under military attack.

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How to apportion the blame? Count the casualties

Lawrence Weschler writes: The news out of Israel and Palestine: relentless, remorseless, repetitively compulsive, rabid.

And I am put in mind of a passage from Norman Mailer, in 1972, in which he attempted to plumb the psychopathology behind America’s relentless bombing of Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam during the Nixon years:

… bombing [which] had become an activity as rational as the act of a man who walks across his own home town to defecate each night on the lawn of a stranger — it is the same stranger each night — such a man would not last long even if he had the most powerful body in town. “Stop,” he would scream as they dragged him away. “I need to shit on that lawn. It’s the only way to keep my body in shape, you fools. I’ve been bitten by a bat!”

A species of human rabies, as Mailer had explained earlier in the same book (“St. George and the Godfather,” his account of the McGovern campaign), “and the word was just, for rabies was the disease of every virulence which was excessive to the need for self-protection.”

I know, I know, and I am bone tired of being told it, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is plenty of blame to go around, but by this point after coming on almost 50 years of Israeli stemwinding and procrastinatory obfuscation, I’d put the proportionate distribution of blame at about the same level as the mortality figures — which is, where are we today (what with Wednesday morning’s four children killed while out playing on a Gaza beach)? What, 280 to 2?

For the single overriding fact defining the Israeli-Palestinian impasse at this point is that if the Palestinians are quiescent and not engaged in any overt rebellion, the Israelis (and here I am speaking of the vast majority of the population who somehow go along with the antics of their leaders, year after year) manage to tell themselves that things are fine and there’s no urgent need to address the situation; and if, as a result, the endlessly put-upon Palestinians do finally rise up in any sort of armed resistance (rocks to rockets), the same Israelis exasperate, “How are we supposed to negotiate with monsters like this?” A wonderfully convenient formula, since it allows the Israelis to go blithely on, systematically stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank, and continuing to confine 1.8 million Gazans within what might well be described as a concentration camp. [Continue reading…] [H/t Philip Weiss]

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Death comes often in Gaza these days, and it comes early

The New York Times reports: They fled by night, using their cellphones as flashlights on pitch-black roads as Israeli shells whistled around them. They carried a white flag and dragged crying children at a trot, a family of 25 headed for a relative’s house farther into the Gaza Strip.

When dawn broke, they split the family among several more relatives. The grandmother, Naama Abu Hamad, 62, insisted on this. That way, she said, they could not all be killed by a single strike, and lose “an entire generation.”

As the Israeli military pressed into the Gaza Strip, taking over areas near the boundary with Israel, the hardships facing civilians deepened. Israel cut off the electricity it supplies to the strip, which is almost all the electricity that comes to Gaza, local and international officials said. For days a blasted sewage pipe has leaked into drinking water, but workers have been unable to fix it because of the danger from airstrikes.

The number of Gazans displaced by the war to official shelters more than doubled in 24 hours, to 47,000 from 22,000, according to the United Nations, but the true figure is probably much higher, since most people, like Ms. Abu Hamad, take refuge with friends and family. [Continue reading…]

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Call for an international military embargo on Israel

Israel has once again unleashed the full force of its military against the captive Palestinian population, particularly in the besieged Gaza Strip, in an inhumane and illegal act of military aggression. Israel’s ability to launch such devastating attacks with impunity largely stems from the vast international military cooperation and trade that it maintains with complicit governments across the world. Over the period 2008-19, the US is set to provide military aid to Israel worth $30bn, while Israeli annual military exports to the world have reached billions of dollars.

In recent years, European countries have exported billions of euros’ worth of weapons to Israel, and the EU has furnished Israeli military companies with research grants worth hundreds of millions. Emerging economies such as India, Brazil and Chile are rapidly increasing their military trade and cooperation with Israel, despite their stated support for Palestinian rights. By importing and exporting arms to Israel and facilitating the development of Israeli military technology, governments are effectively sending a clear message of approval for Israel’s military aggression, including its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Israel’s military technology is marketed as “field-tested” and exported across the world. Military trade and joint military-related research relations with Israel embolden Israeli impunity in committing grave violations of international law and facilitate the entrenchment of Israel’s system of occupation, colonisation and systematic denial of Palestinian rights. We call on the UN and governments across the world to take immediate steps to implement a comprehensive and legally binding military embargo on Israel, similar to that imposed on South Africa during apartheid.

Adolfo Peres Esquivel Nobel Peace Laureate, Argentina, Archbishop Desmond Tutu Nobel Peace Laureate, South Africa, Betty Williams Nobel Peace Laureate, Ireland, Jody Williams Nobel Peace Laureate, US, Mairead Maguire Nobel Peace Laureate, Ireland, Rigoberta Menchú Nobel Peace Laureate, Guatemala, and others.

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The creation of Hamas

A commenter wrote this:

Perverse that the organization called a “Terrorist Organization” by the world media and political community was founded in part by Israel as a means of keeping violent militancy under close surveillance and control in Palestine/Gaza/West Bank.

This comment reiterates an oft-repeated view that Hamas was created with Israel’s approval. This is a misrepresentation of history.

In Hamas Unwritten Chapters, Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian scholar with close ties to Hamas, describes how the organization came into existence.

Although formally announced in 1987 at the beginning of the First Intifada, Hamas began as a branch of Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928. The ability for Ikhwan to thrive in Gaza was provided by the Israeli occupation which began in 1967. Prior to that, Ikhwan had been suppressed by the Egyptian authorities.

Tamimi writes:

Israel opted to revive certain aspects of archaic Ottoman law in its administration of the affairs of the Arab populations in the West Bank and Gaza. This permitted the creation of voluntary or non-governmental organizations such as charitable, educational and other forms of privately funded service institutions. This was a fortunate development for the Palestinians under occupation. For the first ten years of occupation, from 1967-1977, the Israeli occupation authorities pursued a policy of ‘non-intervention’ drawn up and supervised by Moshe Dayan, then Minister of Defence in the Labour government. The intention was to be responsive to Palestinian wishes, allowing them the freedom to enjoy their non-political institutions as far as these institutions remained consistent with Israel rule and posed no threat to it… [It was under these conditions that] the Ikhwan succeeded in more than doubling the number of mosques under their authority.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, following seven years of intermittent civil conflict in that country. Israeli forces advanced all the way to the Lebanese capital Beirut, with the eventual eviction of the PLO from Lebanon. While Beirut was under siege by the Israeli forces, commanded by Israel’s then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, between two and three thousand unprotected and unarmed Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps were massacred by Israel’s ally, the Christian Lebanese Forces. Palestinian populations across the world felt a suffocating sense of anger, impotence and frustration.

Amid all these dramatic events, pressure was mounting on the Ikhwan in Palestine to take action on behalf of their cause. Their social reform program had seemed to absorb all their efforts at a time when developments in and around Palestine called for a more dramatic response. Having successfully outflanked the nationalist and leftist forces within Palestinian society the Islamists now faced the criticism that while others had been making sacrifices resisting occupation they had restricted themselves to social and educational services. Their detractors went so far as to accuse them of brokering a deal with the Occupation Authorities, as a result of which their activities were tolerated and their projects were licensed. The Islamists’ enemies embarked on old-fashioned Nasir-style propaganda, labeling the Ikhwan as the invention of Britain or the United States, or as lackeys of the Zionists.

From 1979 to 1981, throughout the network of the Ikhwan organization inside Gaza and the West Bank, the younger members, who were electrified by Saraya Al-Jihad’s resistance operations, voiced one persistent question: “Why are we not involved in the military resistance to occupation?” [Saraya Al-Jihad was a group of Islamic-oriented members of Fatah that had launched a campaign of armed resistance in the West Bank.] Little was known at the time about a plan to engage in military action which had already been drawn up, during the same period of soul-searching, by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, as the leader of the Ikhwan in Gaza. Clearly, the Ikhwan, or at least some of its leaders, could no longer withstand the pressure from within their own ranks and the mounting scepticism of Palestinian society as a whole. They had also begun to suffer, perhaps, from a growing sense of guilt on their own part over their inaction.

No one took the decision to ignite the Intifada on 8 December 1987; it was triggered by an accident, which in turn set off the spontaneous explosion of anger by the masses. However, it was an explosion anticipated by the Palestinian Ikhwan, for which they had been preparing since at least 1983. The day the Intifada began, the institutions created by the Ikhwan inside and outside Palestine came into action, with each performing the tasks assigned to it. The Ikhwan had no option except to seize the occasion. They needed to exploit it the the limit of their ability, in order to reinstate themselves as the leaders of the jihad to liberate Palestine. Had they not done so, it would have meant the demise of their movement. In addition, only the Ikhwan had the intention, the will, the infrastructure and the global logistical support to keep the flame of the Intifada alight for as long as it could be maintained.

For the Ikhwan, now acting under the name of Hamas, the Intifada was a gift from heaven. They were determined to end the occupation, and to ensure that this would be only the beginning of a long-term jihad. They mobilized their members, employing the network of mosques and other institutions under their control, foremost amongst which was the Islamic University [in Gaza]. They called for civil disobedience and organized rallies, which almost inevitably culminated in stone-throwing at Israeli troops, burning the Israeli flag and setting up improvised road blocks with burning tyres. The Intifada was an explosion of anger in the face of the occupation, sparked off by the dreadful and inhumane conditions endured by the Palestinians for many years and the humiliation and degradation to which they had been subjected. However, the Ikhwan’s slogans were not confined to demands for the end of the occupation. They went further, also demanding the abolition of the state of Israel. Most of the demonstrators had been refugees, and their real homes were not the squalid and wretched UN camps of Gaza or the West Bank but the hundreds of towns and villages that once stood where Israel exists today.

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How Israel — as humane as the IRA — uses warnings to terrorize civilians

I grew up in Britain during the era when the Provisional IRA was conducting a bombing campaign in Northern Ireland and on the mainland. I don’t remember the Provos ever being praised for the fact that they would typically phone the police to issue a warning before their bombs detonated. No one ever dubbed them the most humane terrorist organization in the world.

Danny Morrison, a former IRA prisoner interviewed on the BBC shortly after 9/11 wanted to emphasize, however, that the IRA should not be compared to Al Qaeda:

“Certainly there were civilians killed in the course of this last 30 years, but by and large the IRA made attempts to issue warnings before bomb attacks. That’s the distinction between the people who carried out the attacks in America.”

By the same standard, those who accuse Israel of engaging in state terrorism, should be absolutely clear: Israel’s acts of terror are more like those of the IRA (except on a vastly larger scale), than Al Qaeda’s attacks.

During its 30-year campaign, the IRA killed about 650 civilians. In the last 11 days, Israel has killed about 230 civilians.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous writes: Gamal Magdi Mushtaha had been up all night, unable to sleep, when his cell phone rang at 7:30 a.m. on Friday. The man on the other end of the line identified himself as an Israeli military officer. “Gamal,” he said, addressing the father of three by his first name, “you have to leave your house.”

To anyone other than a resident of Gaza, the call would be baffling. But Mushtaha, a 39-year-old contractor from Shejaiya, a town east of Gaza City, knew what this was about. The Israeli military was going to bomb his home.

He argued with the officer, explaining to him that five families live in the three-story house, including 15 children. “I told him I’m not wanted, that I’m a civilian,” Mushtaha says. “He just said my house was a target and I had five minutes to get out.”

Mushtaha woke up his family and rushed them out the door and down the street. A few minutes later he watched as his home was reduced to rubble in a double airstrike — one missile falling after the other. “I don’t know where to go or what to do. I have no home now,” he says.

Israel has lauded its warnings to Palestinians ahead of bombing their homes as a humanitarian act, a magnanimous gesture towards its enemy and a tactic designed to minimize civilian casualties. But in Gaza, it is a cruel reminder of how powerless residents are in the face of Israel’s military machine and their inability to prevent the wanton destruction of their lives. From Gaza City in the north to Khan Younis in the south, Palestinians in Gaza are being told to leave their homes, businesses, even hospitals to make way for Israeli bombs. Too often, they have nowhere to go. [Continue reading…]

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RT ‘covers’ the shooting down of MH17

Adam Holland writes: Operating a fake news channel to promote state propaganda comes with considerable intrinsic problems and contradictions. Propaganda and news reporting have contrary purposes that propagandists carefully work to obscure by various means. That’s the art of propaganda: blurring the line between reality and BS, creating false equivalencies between the two, and implicitly arguing that the BS is superior. That’s easy for the propagandist when he can cherry-pick what he covers and restrict the information that enters into the conversation. But occasionally events overtake the propagandist’s ability to control the message. The mask slips, and he is revealed as being what he was all along: a craftsman of untruths.

That’s exactly what’s happened very suddenly and clearly yesterday at Russia’s RT news agency. As the wreckage of MH17 burned in the streets and yards of a small town in Donetsk Region in Ukraine, and as the bodies of its 298 passengers and crew lay where they were strewn, unburied and still warm, the people at RT and other Russian propaganda outlets rushed to fill the void between rapidly unfolding reality and the needs of those in power in Russia. How could they both present the appearance of reporting while maintaining Putin’s brand?

Under ordinary circumstances, RT can carefully craft their reporting to fit their underlying message, but when a surface-to-air missile downed that plane, this process was exposed and thrown out of control.

In the morning, as their video showed the smoking wreckage of MH17, RT repeatedly aired two sound clips from two interviews: one with an anonymous witness who off-handedly claimed that he saw the SAM launched from a Ukrainian army position, and another with an anonymous Russian military expert who asserted that the Ukrainian military must have downed the plane. The expert based this conclusion not on any particular knowledge of the facts concerning the shoot-down, but on his assessment of the Ukrainian military as being “inept”. These two clips were repeatedly played on Thursday morning, at least once every 15 minutes. [Continue reading…]

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