Now the arrest of the two conflict tourists referred to in this piece does seem to have been ill advised. They were inside Area A when they were nabbed and Israel really shouldn’t be sticking its nose in there without a powerfully good reason.
Continue reading ‘Ariadna Jove Martí, Conflict Tourism and Wannabe Martyrs’
1.
AIPAC has “… for years molded the policies of the government of the United States in the Middle East, for example, the invasion of Iraq.”
As readers may be already aware, two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinian gunmen were killed in clashes just inside the Gaza Strip today. Writing in El País Juan Miguel Muñoz says that the dead Israeli soldiers were killed “during one of their habitual incursions into Palestinian territory”. He also parrots a Hamas statement that the fatal clash occurred when the IDF “invaded” Gaza.
Bravo to Philip Klein for giving General David Petraeus the opportunity to clarify the following: one, he never requested that the West Bank and Gaza be added to his remit as Commander of CENTCOM, which includes Afghanistan and Iraq. Two, the perceived pro-Israel slant of US Middle East policy is just one of many strategic factors, and not the only one, which he has to take into consideration (the other factors include, Petraeus said, “a whole bunch of extremist organizations, some of which by the way deny Israel’s right to exist. There’s a country that has a nuclear program who denies that the Holocaust took place.”) Three, that he never made the statement, widely attributed to him, that US policy endangers the lives of American soldiers under his command (“There is no mention of lives anywhere in there. I actually reread the statement. It doesn’t say that at all.”)
Here I am on NPR’s AirTalk with Larry Mantle. My segment comes in at 9′15,” but do have a listen to the State Department’s P.J. Crowley, who’s interviewed before me.
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Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for foreign affairs, paid a visit to Gaza and wrote an op-ed about her experience. She didn’t mention Hamas, which rules the strip with an iron fist, once. That omission wasn’t picked up by the New York Times sub-editors either. Let’s be thankful that the Elder did.
Now this is where tragedy turns to farce. Sari Hanafi is an academic at the American University of Beirut. He recently visited the UK to participate in “Israel Apartheid Week,” which gave him a platform to promote the book he co-authored on the “anatomy of Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territories.” Halfway through his visit, Hanafi was forced to return to Beirut in order to face a furious gathering of AUB faculty and students who denounced him for collaborating with Israel. The basis for this charge? The co-authors of Hanafi’s book were two Israelis, Michael Givon and Adi Ophir. Because of this heinous act of betrayal, an Arab academic whose book is energetically promoted at a global event which marks the highlight of the boycott movement’s calendar finds himself condemned for breaking the very same boycott through the very same book.
More on this here and here. Most instructive is this statement put out by Hanafi’s supporters - “We strongly sense that a normative and literal application of the rules may sometimes produce paradoxical outcomes” - which is another way of saying that the boycott can make you look extremely silly indeed.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are the Pythons:
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UPDATE: Martin Solomon adds, “Speaking of CNN, take a look at what happened when Rick Sanchez was interviewing Wolf Blitzer, and live responses to Sanchez’s Twitter feed were scrolling along the screen…take a look at the type of thing that made the air: From CNN’s lower third: ‘Jewish lobby runs America’“
In my earlier post (here or join the debate at Harry’s Place,) I mentioned that my appearance this week on CNN was introduced with three clips about the evils of the Israel Lobby featuring Rami Khouri, Stephen Walt and Loretta Napoleoni. I added that I’d never heard of Napoleoni, but one of the Harry’s Place commenters, David Thompson, has. And he points out this miserable apologia for the late, unlamented Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi which Napoleoni published in Socialist Worker, no less!
Here’s a flavor of what she has to say: “He showed strong leadership qualities and organisational skills. The inmates elected him their leader. People were impressed by his determination and his kindness. Once he personally bathed a mujahideen who had been injured and had lost a leg.”
Got the kleenex out yet?
Apparently, CNN International believes that this apologist for Zarqawi, the murderer of American troops and Iraqi civilians, both Shi’a and Sunni, can simultaneously be presented as an authoritative analyst of Middle East politics.
This blog, like so many others, devotes a lot of its efforts to questions arising from the Israel-Palestine conflict. Open any newspaper and you’ll find hectares of news and opinion about the current tension between Israel and the United States. The death of one Thai worker in Israel yesterday, killed by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, has made the front pages of today’s New York Times and the Times of London, to name just two of the many important papers that have prominently covered it.
Continue reading ‘Israel-Palestine And The World’s Forgotten Conflicts’
Crossposted at Harry’s Place.
To anyone who knows the medium of television, the statement that a news program is probably the last place to have a serious discussion about a serious matter is hardly a revelation. The allotted timeframe, generally three or four minutes, precludes any in-depth analysis. Discussants are acutely aware that they have to communicate in soundbites, so rather than engaging with each other, they artfully twist the presenter’s questions into answers that emphasize the talking points they arrived at the studio with. That’s how it’s always been.
As regular readers of this blog know, comments are approved before they are published and deleted if they are not. Given the issues we cover, we receive a disproportionate amount of trash, much of it abusive and antisemitic. Today, though, there was a little more than usual, including such gems as, “I hate jews who do nothing but protect the illegal country of Israel,” and “neocon jews wield almost unchallenged power in republican party foriegn (sic) policy and control many op-ed pages in major american newspapers.” I wondered why. Then the penny dropped. Glenn Greenwald linked to us. Charming company you keep, Glenn.
UPDATE: Thanks to Elder of Ziyon for figuring out a way to copy the above map. Some of you have said that the link below isn’t working, so if you want to see the above online, go here.
As David Axelrod might put it, this is an insult and an affront. Visit the online route map of EgyptAir, the airline owned by the same state which signed an historic peace agreement with Israel in 1979, and you will see, once you click on the “Middle East & Gulf” section, that Israel has, well, disappeared.
Continue reading ‘Egypt’s National Airline Wipes Israel Off the Map’
Even if the Ramat Shlomo announcement and its aftermath is a salutary reminder of the old Yiddish proverb about not spitting in the well you drink from, that should not be the only lesson we draw from this week’s events.
Continue reading ‘Meanwhile, in Ramallah…’
This is a crosspost by Mark Gardner of the CST blog
On 2 March I posted an article expressing concern about John Pilger: and, more importantly, about what would appear to be the repeated failure of his publishers at the New Statesman to moderate or edit his rhetoric concerning Zionism and Jews.
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