A Pathetic democracy!!! (16 Viewers)
- Thread starter ReBeL
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Just read this article out of the mouth of an Israeli lady:
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Rooting for Ordinary Israelis to Wake Up
Palestinian children are not made for war, any more than Israeli children are made for war. Yet while the politicians jockey for power, our Israeli mothers go on loyally sending their children to join the army and terrorize the neighbors, as if that were a normal thing to do, believing it their duty to the nation; and Palestinian mothers continue to live in fear when their kids sneak out to throw stones at the tanks those Israeli kids are driving, and sometimes they come back in a box.
Miki, a former babysitter for my children, granddaughter of a good friend, a sweet, charming girl, was conscripted into the Israeli army at 18 with all the other kids, and became a sharpshooter instructor. Her trainees, still children themselves, go out and shoot Palestinian children in the streets of Nablus or Hebron. Who can make sense of this? And what of another friend's only son Haggai, the dreamer, the nature-lover, who will never sit under a tree again on a summer's day, watching the clouds sail by in the sky? The Czar's army (they call it the IDF here) got him, and ate him alive.
Indeed, the callous Israelis the Palestinians see are not the caring Israelis I know; and the one-dimensional caricatures of Palestinians the world sees in the media are not like the actual Palestinians I know, either. The Palestinians I know are regular, ordinary people, with good days and bad days like everyone else; not perfect, but human; people like me; just people. The Palestinians in the news are always either bad guys, or in mourning--either crazed perpetrators or hapless victims of violence.
Why don't the newspapers ever talk about regular Palestinians, just trying to have a life, just like you and me? A baker in Jenin bakes bread just like a baker in Kansas City or Calcutta, or Beersheba or Haifa; and some kid in Jenin named Mahmoud or Soheila eats it for breakfast with the same satisfaction your kids display, scarfing down their toast and jam in the morning. A minister friend of mine visiting Israel from the USA recently took an Israeli Jewish couple she knows to visit a Palestinian- Arab Israeli couple she knows, and the Jewish woman confided afterwards: "But their children are just like ours!" Well yeah.
Consider my friend, our brother in the quest for peace by nonviolent means, Sam Bahour, a fortysomething Palestinian-American who lives in Al Bireh (next to Ramallah) and believes in "business for peace." You know he has to be an imaginative, creative, optimistic guy because he built a mall made mostly of glass in a town where any teenage Israeli tank commander could decide to achieve security for Israelis by shooting at someone or something in front of the Plaza Mall's impressive glass façade, pretty much at any time. The Plaza Mall is still standing (as of this writing). I think Sam keeps it intact by voodoo.
Meanwhile, whenever things heat up politically, armored vehicles, sometimes tanks, rumble through his home neighborhood at 2 or 3 or 4 AM, scaring the daylights out of his neighbors and his two young daughters. Israeli conscript soldiers not much older than Sam's children, periodically roust pajama-clad people out of their beds to stand fuming in the street till dawn while their apartment complexes are searched for bad guys. It's a relatively upscale neighborhood. The people in their pj's are not very frightening types -- teachers, social workers, accountants. Try to picture a parade of tanks squashing all the parked cars in YOUR neighborhood some night. Sam's wife won't do lunch with Israelis like Sam does occasionally -- no matter how peace-seeking the Israelis proclaim themselves to be. Can you blame her?
In 2004, I left Israel with my family for California and lasted two years. I was homesick. My daughter was homesick. We came back. My son and his dad stayed there; now we're a fractured family like many others from Israel/Palestine--but at least we were free to choose; too many are not. Sam, for instance, lives with his family in Al Bireh from visa renewal to visa renewal because he's never been granted permanent residency--by Israel--to live in Palestine (the West Bank).
What kind of chutzpah is that, making a guy crawl for permission to be with his own wife and kids? What kind of danger to the security of Israelis is posed by a visionary who builds a shopping center with a glass facade in a shoot-em-up, tank-infested, demolition-driven, besieged town? Local moms with no money bring their little kids to the Plaza Mall for free entertainment: Disney video screenings, tumbling mats in the play areas, and maybe clowns or musicians sometimes. The kids are welcome there even if their moms can't buy anything. That's the policy crafted by the team Sam managed for five years. Give the guy a residence permit already, you dumb bureaucrats--he's a veritable community welfare association all by himself. (And what about the thousands more just like him? What crime are they guilty of? Breathing too regularly?)
The new Abominable Trans-Israel Highway gets me to work in under an hour these days, from my house on the coastal plain to my job near Jerusalem. (Israelis call it Kveesh Shesh, which means Highway Six). In building it, the planners did what planners do--they listened to the rich people, the corporate bigwigs, and the politicians in charge, not to the communities they were paving over. As the new state-of-the-art, privately owned commuter highway came into being, Arab towns in Israel like Taibe and Tira saw their built-up areas cut off from their agricultural fields and groves and their open reserves of land for future residential construction, by the route of the Abominable Kveesh Shesh.
Environmental and social activists waged a losing struggle for several years to have the route reflect a little fairness and sanity--let the predominantly Jewish towns along the route sacrifice some of their land, too; let everyone shoulder a fair share of the burden of modernization; and put some of the route underground to let the green spaces survive, for heaven's sake.
But no. The Kveesh Shesh planners knew they could screw the environmental lobby (virtually powerless) and of course the 1.1-million Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel with impunity. The Arab legislators in Israel's Knesset can't protect their constituents when the pie is unequally divided yet again, because no Israeli national administration since independence in 1948 has included any Arab party in the governing coalition. Let 'em eat the ballots their votes are cast on. One of every five citizens in the State of Israel is a Palestinian Arab (we are not talking here about Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza). Insure parity in the allocation of state resources to guarantee they get their fair share? Nah. Not even when a string of official Israeli state commissions of inquiry, year in, year out, declares that it should be done, must be done, will be done. It's never been done. The Abominable Kveesh Shesh is only the latest concrete proof (lots and lots of concrete) of this longstanding but shortsighted policy that continually makes enemies out of neighbors trying to learn to live together. You know what the private company that owns this toll road, taking a heavy toll in so many ways, is called? Derekh Eretz. It's a play on words in Hebrew, roughly translating as both "national road" and an idiom meaning "courtesy and consideration for others." They can laugh about that one all the way to the bank with the blood money - pardon me, the toll money.
When I talk about this stuff with my friends in Israel or my family in the USA, nearly everyone has pretty much the same reaction: Why do I always take the side of the Palestinians? Why am I always harping on the bad things Israel does? Do I (as my own child once accused me) love the Palestinians better than I love my own family?
No. Not better. But not less, either. I guess I've become a Jesus freak in my old age. I love my neighbor as myself. We need each other. To create a sane, fair, prosperous future here, we need each other the way the light needs the shadow, and vice versa. Yin and yang. My enemy completes me, as some early Christian mystic once said. I don't know why the politicians and the generals spend so much time, energy, and tax money trying to prove to us that it's impossible to live together. The help we need is waiting right there on the other side of the wall. Ask the cousins to help us figure out how to live together. Ask Hamas. Tell 'em: Suppose we don't want to be your enemy any more. Come sit down with us as equals and let us find the better way. -Don't say it can't work. Has anyone ever tried it? Isn't there a new organization of ex-combat soldiers from both sides advocating that we do precisely that? Superior force is never more than a temporary solution; even the guys with the guns are learning that, now.
And what am I to do about the scary guard tower I pass every day on my way to work? Nowadays, I work in a nonprofit enterprise that seeks peace on several tracks: It trains Jewish and Palestinian young people and professionals to encounter the other and redesign their maps of reality to include one another's presence in this land; it runs a primary school where Palestinian and Jewish Israeli kids can grow up together in comradeship instead of mutual fear and hate; and it runs a spiritual center where inward knowledge is tapped in the service of mutual respect and understanding between national and religious groups in conflict.
To get to my office near Jerusalem, I drive right past a section of the Indescribably Obscene Separation Barrier that purports to secure my future as a peace-loving Israeli citizen. Every twenty yards or so, this wall--partially disguised with landscaping to look like any old highway noise barrier--sprouts some kind of electronic device with sensors or cameras or heaven knows what, pointed at the people living on the other side. And at the tail end of this particular stretch of Indescribably Obscene Separation Barrier is an Orwellian- looking guard tower, squat, heavy, forbidding, with medieval-looking slits behind which, I assume, sharpshooters can aim their doubtless radar-assisted, night-vision-equipped, microprocessor-enhanced weapons of small-scale but irrevocable destruction.
Sometimes I imagine stopping my car and getting out and walking up the deceptively civilized-looking, artfully landscaped incline toward this guard tower to ask the young Israelis in there to reconsider the choices that have brought them to that place, that task, that venue for war crimes and their own future PTSD. On really bad days I imagine it might be pleasant to keep walking until they shoot me, and be released to wherever Rachel Corrie is now:angel2: .
No more confusion about the clash of narratives. No more feeling like I have met the "Good German" and she is me. The Good German of half a century ago lived close enough to Dachau to smell the flesh burning in the ovens, but went to work every day as usual; gotta pay the rent, gotta put food on the table; she had kids to support, too. Am I her, now? If so, what shall I do about it? If not--just explain the difference, would you? Nearly all my friends cringe if I mention the Nazis, but how is perpetual humiliation and gradual starvation of an entire population any less awful than killing them quicker? In the Banality of Evil Department, who decides on the banality ratings for this or that regime of oppression?
These are the thoughts that give me no rest, so that when a holiday comes around, as Passover did recently, I am unable to celebrate lightheartedly in the ordinary way. Occasionally, as I did this time, I go through the motions, but it seems obscene, somehow. I haven't had a normal sort of holiday feeling in years. Lately, I finally figured out why. Going about your business as usual, insofar as possible, is an act of defiance when you're being oppressed; but when you're the oppressor, it's an act of indifference. The way Catholics give up meat for Lent, I seem to have given up Jewish holidays for the duration. When the last checkpoint has been dismantled, when the wall has been taken down, when all the political prisoners go free, and the neighbors can celebrate their own holidays normally again, I'll get my holidays back. Meanwhile I write essays.
One thing is very clear to me now: Once you let the humanity of the other into your consciousness, you can never go back. I often feel like the Little Mermaid of the fable, who wanted to stay on dry land and walk on two legs. Her wish was granted, but at a price: walking around among the other humans, she was perpetually in pain, feeling as if she walked barefoot on broken glass. I think about that sometimes, driving along the Abominable Kveesh Shesh on my way to my righteous job in the peace biz, passing the Orwellian guard tower bristling with unseen weapons, catching glimpses of the cousins' neighborhoods over there on the other side of the Indescribably Obscene Separation Wall, watched over by well- meaning youngsters in uniform, the good-hearted sons and daughters of my ordinary Israeli friends and neighbors who believe that army service is a national duty, etc., whereas to me it's the Czar's army, no more, no less. (Once upon a time, Jews in Europe went to great lengths to keep their kids out of the Czar's army.)
My awareness of all those good-hearted people who are persuaded that it's necessary to send their kids to kill and die for the nation, but treasonous to dedicate their lives to learning to live harmoniously with the cousins, is worse than fragments of glass underfoot; it's like fragments of glass in my heart.
There is no equating what Israelis suffer and what Palestinians suffer; the asymmetry is there for anyone to see. But pain is always personal. Consider my friends the T. family, whose only son was Haggai, that dreamy, nature-loving, gentle boy who liked to sit under trees and watch the clouds. He was conscripted a couple of years ago and given a bizarrely unsuitable job as a military policeman. He did his best to get transferred out of there, to no avail. Trapped! Trapped for three years in the Czar's army. Three years is an eternity when you're eighteen. Finally, he shot himself. At his base. On Yom Kippur. Now, when I quail at the anger my questions evoke among friends and family, when I feel like an outcast among my own kind, when I get really tired and wonder what it's all for, I think of Haggai. We have to find a better way because we owe it to our kids. All of them, ours and theirs.
Once I asked an Israeli colleague how to get my writing out to a wider audience and he said, "Get rid of the Wise Mom tone." I knew he was wrong, even then, and today I'm more certain than ever. The wise mom's voice is almost the only sane voice left, as Nurit Peled-Elhanan recently told the European Parliament--fragments of glass in the heart notwithstanding. The generals and the politicians haven't taken us anywhere worthwhile in a long, long, long time. It's time to check out a new approach. It's time to listen to the business-for-peace guys and the wise moms. It's long past time.
By DEB REICH
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Rooting for Ordinary Israelis to Wake Up
Palestinian children are not made for war, any more than Israeli children are made for war. Yet while the politicians jockey for power, our Israeli mothers go on loyally sending their children to join the army and terrorize the neighbors, as if that were a normal thing to do, believing it their duty to the nation; and Palestinian mothers continue to live in fear when their kids sneak out to throw stones at the tanks those Israeli kids are driving, and sometimes they come back in a box.
Miki, a former babysitter for my children, granddaughter of a good friend, a sweet, charming girl, was conscripted into the Israeli army at 18 with all the other kids, and became a sharpshooter instructor. Her trainees, still children themselves, go out and shoot Palestinian children in the streets of Nablus or Hebron. Who can make sense of this? And what of another friend's only son Haggai, the dreamer, the nature-lover, who will never sit under a tree again on a summer's day, watching the clouds sail by in the sky? The Czar's army (they call it the IDF here) got him, and ate him alive.
Indeed, the callous Israelis the Palestinians see are not the caring Israelis I know; and the one-dimensional caricatures of Palestinians the world sees in the media are not like the actual Palestinians I know, either. The Palestinians I know are regular, ordinary people, with good days and bad days like everyone else; not perfect, but human; people like me; just people. The Palestinians in the news are always either bad guys, or in mourning--either crazed perpetrators or hapless victims of violence.
Why don't the newspapers ever talk about regular Palestinians, just trying to have a life, just like you and me? A baker in Jenin bakes bread just like a baker in Kansas City or Calcutta, or Beersheba or Haifa; and some kid in Jenin named Mahmoud or Soheila eats it for breakfast with the same satisfaction your kids display, scarfing down their toast and jam in the morning. A minister friend of mine visiting Israel from the USA recently took an Israeli Jewish couple she knows to visit a Palestinian- Arab Israeli couple she knows, and the Jewish woman confided afterwards: "But their children are just like ours!" Well yeah.
Consider my friend, our brother in the quest for peace by nonviolent means, Sam Bahour, a fortysomething Palestinian-American who lives in Al Bireh (next to Ramallah) and believes in "business for peace." You know he has to be an imaginative, creative, optimistic guy because he built a mall made mostly of glass in a town where any teenage Israeli tank commander could decide to achieve security for Israelis by shooting at someone or something in front of the Plaza Mall's impressive glass façade, pretty much at any time. The Plaza Mall is still standing (as of this writing). I think Sam keeps it intact by voodoo.
Meanwhile, whenever things heat up politically, armored vehicles, sometimes tanks, rumble through his home neighborhood at 2 or 3 or 4 AM, scaring the daylights out of his neighbors and his two young daughters. Israeli conscript soldiers not much older than Sam's children, periodically roust pajama-clad people out of their beds to stand fuming in the street till dawn while their apartment complexes are searched for bad guys. It's a relatively upscale neighborhood. The people in their pj's are not very frightening types -- teachers, social workers, accountants. Try to picture a parade of tanks squashing all the parked cars in YOUR neighborhood some night. Sam's wife won't do lunch with Israelis like Sam does occasionally -- no matter how peace-seeking the Israelis proclaim themselves to be. Can you blame her?
In 2004, I left Israel with my family for California and lasted two years. I was homesick. My daughter was homesick. We came back. My son and his dad stayed there; now we're a fractured family like many others from Israel/Palestine--but at least we were free to choose; too many are not. Sam, for instance, lives with his family in Al Bireh from visa renewal to visa renewal because he's never been granted permanent residency--by Israel--to live in Palestine (the West Bank).
What kind of chutzpah is that, making a guy crawl for permission to be with his own wife and kids? What kind of danger to the security of Israelis is posed by a visionary who builds a shopping center with a glass facade in a shoot-em-up, tank-infested, demolition-driven, besieged town? Local moms with no money bring their little kids to the Plaza Mall for free entertainment: Disney video screenings, tumbling mats in the play areas, and maybe clowns or musicians sometimes. The kids are welcome there even if their moms can't buy anything. That's the policy crafted by the team Sam managed for five years. Give the guy a residence permit already, you dumb bureaucrats--he's a veritable community welfare association all by himself. (And what about the thousands more just like him? What crime are they guilty of? Breathing too regularly?)
The new Abominable Trans-Israel Highway gets me to work in under an hour these days, from my house on the coastal plain to my job near Jerusalem. (Israelis call it Kveesh Shesh, which means Highway Six). In building it, the planners did what planners do--they listened to the rich people, the corporate bigwigs, and the politicians in charge, not to the communities they were paving over. As the new state-of-the-art, privately owned commuter highway came into being, Arab towns in Israel like Taibe and Tira saw their built-up areas cut off from their agricultural fields and groves and their open reserves of land for future residential construction, by the route of the Abominable Kveesh Shesh.
Environmental and social activists waged a losing struggle for several years to have the route reflect a little fairness and sanity--let the predominantly Jewish towns along the route sacrifice some of their land, too; let everyone shoulder a fair share of the burden of modernization; and put some of the route underground to let the green spaces survive, for heaven's sake.
But no. The Kveesh Shesh planners knew they could screw the environmental lobby (virtually powerless) and of course the 1.1-million Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel with impunity. The Arab legislators in Israel's Knesset can't protect their constituents when the pie is unequally divided yet again, because no Israeli national administration since independence in 1948 has included any Arab party in the governing coalition. Let 'em eat the ballots their votes are cast on. One of every five citizens in the State of Israel is a Palestinian Arab (we are not talking here about Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza). Insure parity in the allocation of state resources to guarantee they get their fair share? Nah. Not even when a string of official Israeli state commissions of inquiry, year in, year out, declares that it should be done, must be done, will be done. It's never been done. The Abominable Kveesh Shesh is only the latest concrete proof (lots and lots of concrete) of this longstanding but shortsighted policy that continually makes enemies out of neighbors trying to learn to live together. You know what the private company that owns this toll road, taking a heavy toll in so many ways, is called? Derekh Eretz. It's a play on words in Hebrew, roughly translating as both "national road" and an idiom meaning "courtesy and consideration for others." They can laugh about that one all the way to the bank with the blood money - pardon me, the toll money.
When I talk about this stuff with my friends in Israel or my family in the USA, nearly everyone has pretty much the same reaction: Why do I always take the side of the Palestinians? Why am I always harping on the bad things Israel does? Do I (as my own child once accused me) love the Palestinians better than I love my own family?
No. Not better. But not less, either. I guess I've become a Jesus freak in my old age. I love my neighbor as myself. We need each other. To create a sane, fair, prosperous future here, we need each other the way the light needs the shadow, and vice versa. Yin and yang. My enemy completes me, as some early Christian mystic once said. I don't know why the politicians and the generals spend so much time, energy, and tax money trying to prove to us that it's impossible to live together. The help we need is waiting right there on the other side of the wall. Ask the cousins to help us figure out how to live together. Ask Hamas. Tell 'em: Suppose we don't want to be your enemy any more. Come sit down with us as equals and let us find the better way. -Don't say it can't work. Has anyone ever tried it? Isn't there a new organization of ex-combat soldiers from both sides advocating that we do precisely that? Superior force is never more than a temporary solution; even the guys with the guns are learning that, now.
And what am I to do about the scary guard tower I pass every day on my way to work? Nowadays, I work in a nonprofit enterprise that seeks peace on several tracks: It trains Jewish and Palestinian young people and professionals to encounter the other and redesign their maps of reality to include one another's presence in this land; it runs a primary school where Palestinian and Jewish Israeli kids can grow up together in comradeship instead of mutual fear and hate; and it runs a spiritual center where inward knowledge is tapped in the service of mutual respect and understanding between national and religious groups in conflict.
To get to my office near Jerusalem, I drive right past a section of the Indescribably Obscene Separation Barrier that purports to secure my future as a peace-loving Israeli citizen. Every twenty yards or so, this wall--partially disguised with landscaping to look like any old highway noise barrier--sprouts some kind of electronic device with sensors or cameras or heaven knows what, pointed at the people living on the other side. And at the tail end of this particular stretch of Indescribably Obscene Separation Barrier is an Orwellian- looking guard tower, squat, heavy, forbidding, with medieval-looking slits behind which, I assume, sharpshooters can aim their doubtless radar-assisted, night-vision-equipped, microprocessor-enhanced weapons of small-scale but irrevocable destruction.
Sometimes I imagine stopping my car and getting out and walking up the deceptively civilized-looking, artfully landscaped incline toward this guard tower to ask the young Israelis in there to reconsider the choices that have brought them to that place, that task, that venue for war crimes and their own future PTSD. On really bad days I imagine it might be pleasant to keep walking until they shoot me, and be released to wherever Rachel Corrie is now:angel2: .
No more confusion about the clash of narratives. No more feeling like I have met the "Good German" and she is me. The Good German of half a century ago lived close enough to Dachau to smell the flesh burning in the ovens, but went to work every day as usual; gotta pay the rent, gotta put food on the table; she had kids to support, too. Am I her, now? If so, what shall I do about it? If not--just explain the difference, would you? Nearly all my friends cringe if I mention the Nazis, but how is perpetual humiliation and gradual starvation of an entire population any less awful than killing them quicker? In the Banality of Evil Department, who decides on the banality ratings for this or that regime of oppression?
These are the thoughts that give me no rest, so that when a holiday comes around, as Passover did recently, I am unable to celebrate lightheartedly in the ordinary way. Occasionally, as I did this time, I go through the motions, but it seems obscene, somehow. I haven't had a normal sort of holiday feeling in years. Lately, I finally figured out why. Going about your business as usual, insofar as possible, is an act of defiance when you're being oppressed; but when you're the oppressor, it's an act of indifference. The way Catholics give up meat for Lent, I seem to have given up Jewish holidays for the duration. When the last checkpoint has been dismantled, when the wall has been taken down, when all the political prisoners go free, and the neighbors can celebrate their own holidays normally again, I'll get my holidays back. Meanwhile I write essays.
One thing is very clear to me now: Once you let the humanity of the other into your consciousness, you can never go back. I often feel like the Little Mermaid of the fable, who wanted to stay on dry land and walk on two legs. Her wish was granted, but at a price: walking around among the other humans, she was perpetually in pain, feeling as if she walked barefoot on broken glass. I think about that sometimes, driving along the Abominable Kveesh Shesh on my way to my righteous job in the peace biz, passing the Orwellian guard tower bristling with unseen weapons, catching glimpses of the cousins' neighborhoods over there on the other side of the Indescribably Obscene Separation Wall, watched over by well- meaning youngsters in uniform, the good-hearted sons and daughters of my ordinary Israeli friends and neighbors who believe that army service is a national duty, etc., whereas to me it's the Czar's army, no more, no less. (Once upon a time, Jews in Europe went to great lengths to keep their kids out of the Czar's army.)
My awareness of all those good-hearted people who are persuaded that it's necessary to send their kids to kill and die for the nation, but treasonous to dedicate their lives to learning to live harmoniously with the cousins, is worse than fragments of glass underfoot; it's like fragments of glass in my heart.
There is no equating what Israelis suffer and what Palestinians suffer; the asymmetry is there for anyone to see. But pain is always personal. Consider my friends the T. family, whose only son was Haggai, that dreamy, nature-loving, gentle boy who liked to sit under trees and watch the clouds. He was conscripted a couple of years ago and given a bizarrely unsuitable job as a military policeman. He did his best to get transferred out of there, to no avail. Trapped! Trapped for three years in the Czar's army. Three years is an eternity when you're eighteen. Finally, he shot himself. At his base. On Yom Kippur. Now, when I quail at the anger my questions evoke among friends and family, when I feel like an outcast among my own kind, when I get really tired and wonder what it's all for, I think of Haggai. We have to find a better way because we owe it to our kids. All of them, ours and theirs.
Once I asked an Israeli colleague how to get my writing out to a wider audience and he said, "Get rid of the Wise Mom tone." I knew he was wrong, even then, and today I'm more certain than ever. The wise mom's voice is almost the only sane voice left, as Nurit Peled-Elhanan recently told the European Parliament--fragments of glass in the heart notwithstanding. The generals and the politicians haven't taken us anywhere worthwhile in a long, long, long time. It's time to check out a new approach. It's time to listen to the business-for-peace guys and the wise moms. It's long past time.
By DEB REICH
Truly, that is a point that I was going to bring up. We only seem to speak about the actions of a minority on both sides. Only a minority of Israelis really want to kill and harass Palestine, and only a minority of Palestinians want to destroy Israel.
But, what really cooks my muffins, is that there is constant battle in the holiest place on earth. I'm a member of the Society of Friends, loosely a Christian religion, but I follow the teachings of Buddha/Christ. If you've ever been to Israel, especially Jerusalem, there is a palpable feeling of human intention in the air. Some people call it prayer, but whatever it is, you can actually feel it like you would feel the sun on a hot day. The fact that the Muslims and Jews are killing each other all over the place really detracts from what could be the centre of religious cooperation.
My computer is being retarted. I will post it later.
Your logic is extremely warped! 
The only serious difference between military action is that the israelis are killing INNOCENT civilians and the palestenians are fighting against the occupation. The deaths of Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall and James Miller can speak for themselves. If Palestenians were provided weapons and tanks by the U.S and the jews were blowing themselves you would not be justifying the palestenians rolling throught the streets and killing civilians. You would think after the "Holocaust" the israelis would be the last people on earth to be murderers. People with no regard to human life are Pigs. Actually its an insult to the pigs. Sorry Pigs.
For the Cause? visit
http://revisionistreview.blogspot.com
The only serious difference between military action is that the israelis are killing INNOCENT civilians and the palestenians are fighting against the occupation. The deaths of Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall and James Miller can speak for themselves. If Palestenians were provided weapons and tanks by the U.S and the jews were blowing themselves you would not be justifying the palestenians rolling throught the streets and killing civilians. You would think after the "Holocaust" the israelis would be the last people on earth to be murderers. People with no regard to human life are Pigs. Actually its an insult to the pigs. Sorry Pigs.For the Cause? visit
http://revisionistreview.blogspot.com
I think Im gonna compile all the sources/articles posted on this thread, kinda like a crash course in the Isreali-Palastinian conflict...
I'd like to see more from the Israelis' point of view though...from an israeli would be nice or perhaps from outsiders who know the "Whys" instead of constantly just talking about the bombings and attacks on either sides.
I'd like to see more from the Israelis' point of view though...from an israeli would be nice or perhaps from outsiders who know the "Whys" instead of constantly just talking about the bombings and attacks on either sides.
Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
A Primer
http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/toc-pal-isr-primer.html
A Primer
http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/toc-pal-isr-primer.html
US Media Bias: Covering Israel/Palestine
Remi Kanazi
New York, NY
March 30, 2006
On July 18, 2005, fourteen year old Ragheb al-Masri sat in the back of a taxi with his parents at the Abo Holi checkpoint. An Israeli bullet penetrated his back and cracked open his chest. His mother screamed as his body lay lifeless. Have you heard his name? I wouldn't expect that you have because CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post didn't report the killing online. If they had quoted his parents, their readers would have been able to feel their tears and envision the heartbreak. Ultimately, no Israeli soldier was arrested or even reprimanded.
Every time a suicide bombing strikes Israel, mass coverage of the tragedy begins instantly. Whether landing on the front page of The Times or taking up the headline block on CNN.com, the pain Israeli people endure is shown endlessly. Israelis do suffer. Suicide bombings are horrific. Nevertheless, Palestinian pain occurs far more frequently, and yet often overlooked by the mainstream American media.
Since the uprising in September of 2000, more than 3,800 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied Territories as a result of the conflict. Most Americans are unaware of the toll because it is not properly reported. In 2004, If Americans Knew — an American organization that exposes and examines the facts of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — conducted a study and reported 808 Palestinian conflict deaths and 107 Israelis conflict deaths. The study, however, found that The Times covered Israeli deaths in the headline or the first paragraph in 159 articles — meaning in some cases they covered the same death numerous times. In contrast, The Times only covered about 40 percent of Palestinian deaths — 334 of 808 — in the headline or in the first paragraph of the articles. Nearly eight Palestinians died for every one Israeli. Disturbingly The Times is considered the quintessential "liberal" newspaper in the US.
When Palestinian deaths occur, especially militant deaths, the Israeli government's version of the story is taken as fact in the mainstream US media. In most cases, articles covering Palestinian deaths only include Israeli quotes, without citing Palestinian witnesses and other credible non-governmental organization sources. This continues to be the case even after human rights groups have released reports stating Israel has indiscriminately shot at civilians, even using them as human shields. In as early as 2001, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated, "At least 470 Palestinians have been killed, most of them unlawfully by Israeli security forces when their lives [Israeli Security Forces] and the lives of others were not in danger." Since the AI/HRW report, more than 3,350 Palestinians have been killed. It is remarkable how so many can accept the Israeli government as the sole, objective source when it forcibly occupies the Palestinian territories.
On Aug. 25 the headline on CNN.com read, "Israel: Five Militants Shot in Raid." The article claims the militants were suspected of being involved with a suicide bombing; they were armed and exchanged fire with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), and five Palestinians were shot. The report also mentioned the town, Netanya, where the suicide bombing referenced in the article took place, was a frequent site for suicide bombings. No Palestinian quote, no witnesses giving an alternative perspective, and no mention that three of the victims shot were under the age of 18.
The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, covered the same event including Palestinian quotes and some Palestinian claims. The paper reported that the IOF killed five Palestinians on Aug. 25, three of whom Palestinian sources claim to be between the ages of 14 and 17 with no known links to militant organizations. Four of the victims died at the scene, while one of the young victims died later that night.
A number of Palestinian reporters cited witnesses claiming all five Palestinians were unarmed, including the two militants killed. This was the first fatal attack since the "disengagement" of the Gaza Strip.
The contrast in coverage between CNN and Haaretz is staggering. The CNN headline was written in absolutes: "5 militants shot in raid." Their article continues by stating only the Israeli claim that five militants were killed, making the headline biased and misleading. The Haaretz headline read: "U.S. urges restraint after IDF raid that killed 5 Palestinians." This headline refers to the people who were shot as Palestinians and not solely as "militants." The Haaretz article covers conflicting Israeli and Palestinian claims, which made it impossible to determine whether or not all five killed were militants or civilians.
On Sept. 7 the findings of a probe, conducted by Haaretz and the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, found that three of the five Palestinians killed in the assault on Aug. 25 were under the age of 18 and did not have any links to known terrorist organizations. Their investigation also found that the two militants killed were low ranking operatives who were not armed at the time. This repudiates the Israeli claim that IOF soldiers were in the area involved in an operation against militant leaders and a "ticking bomb" with connection to suicide bombings in Israel.
"Ticking bombs" are characterized as individuals that are an imminent physical threat to the state of Israel or people holding information that imminently threaten the security of the state of Israel. In most cases, such individuals are referred to as would-be suicide bombers or those holding valuable information on persons planning on carrying out a suicide bombing. Israel used this scenario in the past as an excuse to torture Palestinians with impunity. In a 1998 study on the "ticking bomb" scenario, B'Tselem found Israel's claim that it is necessary to use torture against "ticking bombs" was in most cases "totally unsubstantiated." The recent findings of Haaretz and B'Tselem profoundly call into question Israel's reliability on affairs in the Occupied Territories and reaffirm the notion that using only Israeli sources is careless and unacceptable.
Israel professes it doesn't have the death penalty, but it has in the past and "maintains the right" in the future, to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of "wanted" Palestinians. Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz admitted on Aug. 26 that Israel invaded and fired first in the incident that killed five Palestinians, while maintaining the notion that the militants — meaning all five killed — were armed. Again, Israel, the occupying force, reserves the "right" to play God with the lives of the Palestinian people. There are many examples of unarmed children and disabled Palestinians being injured or killed by Israeli forces. More than 875 women and children have died since the start of the conflict under the guise of security. Nearly 25 percent of the children killed were under the age of 12.
Coincidence or Collusion?
Why are "left wing" media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN not reporting the Palestinian side of the story? Well, the simple answer is The Times and CNN are not liberal, nor honest. They cover injustices only when there is no risk of backlash from readers and advertisers. The media moguls are only "aware" and objective when it pays them to be. CNN and The Times must vet their content, so as not to be viewed as "pro-Palestinian," in fear that advertisers will pull their ads or commercials, leading to a loss in revenue.
Israel solidified itself as the strategic ally of the US in the Middle East after its victory in the Six Day War (1967 Arab/Israeli War). Israel was taken under the wing of the US, which saw its potential as a strategic, military, and political force.
The rise of religious Zionism after 1967 and the subsequent call for the preservation of the Jewish homeland became relevant in America with the Jewish elite as well with Christian conservatives. Jewish historian, Norman Finkelstein, recalls in his book The Holocaust Industry,
"Accordingly, American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel. After the 1967 war, Israel's military élan could be celebrated because its guns point in the right direction — against America's enemies."
Finkelstein continued,
"Now they [The Jewish elite] could pose as the natural interlocutors for America's newest strategic asset. From bit players, they could advance to top billing in the Cold War drama. Thus for American Jewry, as well as the United States, Israel became a strategic asset."
As the years progressed, Israel claimed victory in the 1973 Ramadan War (Yom Kippur War) with the defining help of America. The mounting support for Israel as a war victor, a "democracy," and a capitalistic society settled well with Americans.
38 years after the Six-Day war, America sees an even stronger military and political ally in Israel, and the pro-Israeli lobby has made sure that the sense of Jewish victimization has never faltered. Finkelstein commented, "Organized Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel and its own morally indefensible policies."
The effectiveness of the pro-Israeli lobby hinges on the willingness of the US government to support Israel. According to the strongly pro-Israeli Web site, the Jewish Virtual Library, the US has given Israel nearly 50 billion dollars in aid from 1974 to 1997. If the US government didn't have significant interests in backing Israel, the pro-Israeli lobby would be less of a factor — much like the Palestinian lobby. Interestingly, the Jewish Lobby only supported Israel when it was in their interests to do so. Finkelstein noted, "The Holocaust industry sprung up only after Israel's overwhelming display of military dominance and flourished amid extreme Israeli triumphalism."
The convergence of American and Israeli support found success in de-legitimizing the Palestinian cause. This consequently washed Israel's hands clean in US eyes of the atrocities committed throughout the Middle East — i.e. the invasion and indiscriminate bombing of Beirut in 1982 — and more directly to the Palestinian people through dispossession and occupation. Strikingly, the American media refuses to differentiate between the past suffering of the Jewish people and the suffering Israelis endure due to inept Israeli policy which has besieged the Palestinian people for 58 years.
Consider the backlash professors at Colombia received because they were accused of promoting anti-Semitism. In reality Joseph Massad, one of the accused professors, and others simply critiqued the Israeli government. As a result, pro-Israeli groups like the David Project and Campus Watch tried to silence their right to free speech. Just as questioning the war in Iraq is "un-American," the idea of questioning Israeli actions is "anti-Semitic." Ridiculous assertions such as equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a way in which the pro-Israeli lobby restricts the media from criticizing Israel or fairly reporting matters.
In a post-9/11 world, it has been much easier to side with mostly European Israelis, who look more like Americans, who love capitalism like Americans, and who are fighting "Arab terror" like Americans. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, the media doesn't like to diverge from mainstream political correctness. If objectivity was the top priority of the media, they would not have dropped the ball in the coverage leading up to the war in Iraq. Even Bob Woodward of the "liberal" Washington Post admitted, "We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder."
The media are corporate sponsored outlets that feed into the majority support at a time when the Palestinian lobby is virtually non-existent in America. The "biblical rights" of Jews and their suffering the Holocaust are exploited to reassert the status of victimization. Pro-Israeli advocates incorporate the notion that the Arabs are trying to "drive the Jews to the sea."
But who would really push the American/Israeli agenda, besides those fearing backlash? The neoconservatives and Christian coalitions support Israel. The Pat Robertsons and the Billy Grahams. Neoconservative talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Best selling authors Alan Dershowitz and Thomas Friedman. Lobbying groups like AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), and attack dogs such as Daniel Pipes and his cronies in Campus Watch. Fortune 500 companies such as Caterpillar, McDonalds, Disney and Starbucks, to name a few. But most damningly, it's the "liberals," that complete the majority support. Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, the honest broker himself — Bill Clinton, the heads of The Times, CNN and the rest of the "left wing" media that won't stand up for what's morally right. These people are too selfish or too weak to do what's right, and its "off with the heads" of those who do.
The dilemma of the "free press" in America is that it isn't free. The media hinges on the support of the people, newspaper subscriptions, television viewership, advertisements, and the bottom line of their companies. We live in a capitalistic society run by corporate profits and essential year over year growth.
I understand why The New York Times and CNN report the way they do. They are media hacks run by the corporate dollar. Injustice is injustice. Murder is murder. While Palestinian suffering goes on unreported, children like Ragheb Al-Masri remain dead and forgotten, and the American press remains biased.
http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/2303.cfm
Remi Kanazi
New York, NY
March 30, 2006
On July 18, 2005, fourteen year old Ragheb al-Masri sat in the back of a taxi with his parents at the Abo Holi checkpoint. An Israeli bullet penetrated his back and cracked open his chest. His mother screamed as his body lay lifeless. Have you heard his name? I wouldn't expect that you have because CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post didn't report the killing online. If they had quoted his parents, their readers would have been able to feel their tears and envision the heartbreak. Ultimately, no Israeli soldier was arrested or even reprimanded.
Every time a suicide bombing strikes Israel, mass coverage of the tragedy begins instantly. Whether landing on the front page of The Times or taking up the headline block on CNN.com, the pain Israeli people endure is shown endlessly. Israelis do suffer. Suicide bombings are horrific. Nevertheless, Palestinian pain occurs far more frequently, and yet often overlooked by the mainstream American media.
Since the uprising in September of 2000, more than 3,800 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied Territories as a result of the conflict. Most Americans are unaware of the toll because it is not properly reported. In 2004, If Americans Knew — an American organization that exposes and examines the facts of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — conducted a study and reported 808 Palestinian conflict deaths and 107 Israelis conflict deaths. The study, however, found that The Times covered Israeli deaths in the headline or the first paragraph in 159 articles — meaning in some cases they covered the same death numerous times. In contrast, The Times only covered about 40 percent of Palestinian deaths — 334 of 808 — in the headline or in the first paragraph of the articles. Nearly eight Palestinians died for every one Israeli. Disturbingly The Times is considered the quintessential "liberal" newspaper in the US.
When Palestinian deaths occur, especially militant deaths, the Israeli government's version of the story is taken as fact in the mainstream US media. In most cases, articles covering Palestinian deaths only include Israeli quotes, without citing Palestinian witnesses and other credible non-governmental organization sources. This continues to be the case even after human rights groups have released reports stating Israel has indiscriminately shot at civilians, even using them as human shields. In as early as 2001, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated, "At least 470 Palestinians have been killed, most of them unlawfully by Israeli security forces when their lives [Israeli Security Forces] and the lives of others were not in danger." Since the AI/HRW report, more than 3,350 Palestinians have been killed. It is remarkable how so many can accept the Israeli government as the sole, objective source when it forcibly occupies the Palestinian territories.
On Aug. 25 the headline on CNN.com read, "Israel: Five Militants Shot in Raid." The article claims the militants were suspected of being involved with a suicide bombing; they were armed and exchanged fire with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), and five Palestinians were shot. The report also mentioned the town, Netanya, where the suicide bombing referenced in the article took place, was a frequent site for suicide bombings. No Palestinian quote, no witnesses giving an alternative perspective, and no mention that three of the victims shot were under the age of 18.
The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, covered the same event including Palestinian quotes and some Palestinian claims. The paper reported that the IOF killed five Palestinians on Aug. 25, three of whom Palestinian sources claim to be between the ages of 14 and 17 with no known links to militant organizations. Four of the victims died at the scene, while one of the young victims died later that night.
A number of Palestinian reporters cited witnesses claiming all five Palestinians were unarmed, including the two militants killed. This was the first fatal attack since the "disengagement" of the Gaza Strip.
The contrast in coverage between CNN and Haaretz is staggering. The CNN headline was written in absolutes: "5 militants shot in raid." Their article continues by stating only the Israeli claim that five militants were killed, making the headline biased and misleading. The Haaretz headline read: "U.S. urges restraint after IDF raid that killed 5 Palestinians." This headline refers to the people who were shot as Palestinians and not solely as "militants." The Haaretz article covers conflicting Israeli and Palestinian claims, which made it impossible to determine whether or not all five killed were militants or civilians.
On Sept. 7 the findings of a probe, conducted by Haaretz and the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, found that three of the five Palestinians killed in the assault on Aug. 25 were under the age of 18 and did not have any links to known terrorist organizations. Their investigation also found that the two militants killed were low ranking operatives who were not armed at the time. This repudiates the Israeli claim that IOF soldiers were in the area involved in an operation against militant leaders and a "ticking bomb" with connection to suicide bombings in Israel.
"Ticking bombs" are characterized as individuals that are an imminent physical threat to the state of Israel or people holding information that imminently threaten the security of the state of Israel. In most cases, such individuals are referred to as would-be suicide bombers or those holding valuable information on persons planning on carrying out a suicide bombing. Israel used this scenario in the past as an excuse to torture Palestinians with impunity. In a 1998 study on the "ticking bomb" scenario, B'Tselem found Israel's claim that it is necessary to use torture against "ticking bombs" was in most cases "totally unsubstantiated." The recent findings of Haaretz and B'Tselem profoundly call into question Israel's reliability on affairs in the Occupied Territories and reaffirm the notion that using only Israeli sources is careless and unacceptable.
Israel professes it doesn't have the death penalty, but it has in the past and "maintains the right" in the future, to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of "wanted" Palestinians. Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz admitted on Aug. 26 that Israel invaded and fired first in the incident that killed five Palestinians, while maintaining the notion that the militants — meaning all five killed — were armed. Again, Israel, the occupying force, reserves the "right" to play God with the lives of the Palestinian people. There are many examples of unarmed children and disabled Palestinians being injured or killed by Israeli forces. More than 875 women and children have died since the start of the conflict under the guise of security. Nearly 25 percent of the children killed were under the age of 12.
Coincidence or Collusion?
Why are "left wing" media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN not reporting the Palestinian side of the story? Well, the simple answer is The Times and CNN are not liberal, nor honest. They cover injustices only when there is no risk of backlash from readers and advertisers. The media moguls are only "aware" and objective when it pays them to be. CNN and The Times must vet their content, so as not to be viewed as "pro-Palestinian," in fear that advertisers will pull their ads or commercials, leading to a loss in revenue.
Israel solidified itself as the strategic ally of the US in the Middle East after its victory in the Six Day War (1967 Arab/Israeli War). Israel was taken under the wing of the US, which saw its potential as a strategic, military, and political force.
The rise of religious Zionism after 1967 and the subsequent call for the preservation of the Jewish homeland became relevant in America with the Jewish elite as well with Christian conservatives. Jewish historian, Norman Finkelstein, recalls in his book The Holocaust Industry,
"Accordingly, American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel. After the 1967 war, Israel's military élan could be celebrated because its guns point in the right direction — against America's enemies."
Finkelstein continued,
"Now they [The Jewish elite] could pose as the natural interlocutors for America's newest strategic asset. From bit players, they could advance to top billing in the Cold War drama. Thus for American Jewry, as well as the United States, Israel became a strategic asset."
As the years progressed, Israel claimed victory in the 1973 Ramadan War (Yom Kippur War) with the defining help of America. The mounting support for Israel as a war victor, a "democracy," and a capitalistic society settled well with Americans.
38 years after the Six-Day war, America sees an even stronger military and political ally in Israel, and the pro-Israeli lobby has made sure that the sense of Jewish victimization has never faltered. Finkelstein commented, "Organized Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel and its own morally indefensible policies."
The effectiveness of the pro-Israeli lobby hinges on the willingness of the US government to support Israel. According to the strongly pro-Israeli Web site, the Jewish Virtual Library, the US has given Israel nearly 50 billion dollars in aid from 1974 to 1997. If the US government didn't have significant interests in backing Israel, the pro-Israeli lobby would be less of a factor — much like the Palestinian lobby. Interestingly, the Jewish Lobby only supported Israel when it was in their interests to do so. Finkelstein noted, "The Holocaust industry sprung up only after Israel's overwhelming display of military dominance and flourished amid extreme Israeli triumphalism."
The convergence of American and Israeli support found success in de-legitimizing the Palestinian cause. This consequently washed Israel's hands clean in US eyes of the atrocities committed throughout the Middle East — i.e. the invasion and indiscriminate bombing of Beirut in 1982 — and more directly to the Palestinian people through dispossession and occupation. Strikingly, the American media refuses to differentiate between the past suffering of the Jewish people and the suffering Israelis endure due to inept Israeli policy which has besieged the Palestinian people for 58 years.
Consider the backlash professors at Colombia received because they were accused of promoting anti-Semitism. In reality Joseph Massad, one of the accused professors, and others simply critiqued the Israeli government. As a result, pro-Israeli groups like the David Project and Campus Watch tried to silence their right to free speech. Just as questioning the war in Iraq is "un-American," the idea of questioning Israeli actions is "anti-Semitic." Ridiculous assertions such as equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a way in which the pro-Israeli lobby restricts the media from criticizing Israel or fairly reporting matters.
In a post-9/11 world, it has been much easier to side with mostly European Israelis, who look more like Americans, who love capitalism like Americans, and who are fighting "Arab terror" like Americans. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, the media doesn't like to diverge from mainstream political correctness. If objectivity was the top priority of the media, they would not have dropped the ball in the coverage leading up to the war in Iraq. Even Bob Woodward of the "liberal" Washington Post admitted, "We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder."
The media are corporate sponsored outlets that feed into the majority support at a time when the Palestinian lobby is virtually non-existent in America. The "biblical rights" of Jews and their suffering the Holocaust are exploited to reassert the status of victimization. Pro-Israeli advocates incorporate the notion that the Arabs are trying to "drive the Jews to the sea."
But who would really push the American/Israeli agenda, besides those fearing backlash? The neoconservatives and Christian coalitions support Israel. The Pat Robertsons and the Billy Grahams. Neoconservative talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Best selling authors Alan Dershowitz and Thomas Friedman. Lobbying groups like AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), and attack dogs such as Daniel Pipes and his cronies in Campus Watch. Fortune 500 companies such as Caterpillar, McDonalds, Disney and Starbucks, to name a few. But most damningly, it's the "liberals," that complete the majority support. Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, the honest broker himself — Bill Clinton, the heads of The Times, CNN and the rest of the "left wing" media that won't stand up for what's morally right. These people are too selfish or too weak to do what's right, and its "off with the heads" of those who do.
The dilemma of the "free press" in America is that it isn't free. The media hinges on the support of the people, newspaper subscriptions, television viewership, advertisements, and the bottom line of their companies. We live in a capitalistic society run by corporate profits and essential year over year growth.
I understand why The New York Times and CNN report the way they do. They are media hacks run by the corporate dollar. Injustice is injustice. Murder is murder. While Palestinian suffering goes on unreported, children like Ragheb Al-Masri remain dead and forgotten, and the American press remains biased.
http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/2303.cfm
No Children in Palestine
By Julie Hollar
On January 4, NPR’s Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep noted that Palestinian presidential candidate Mahmoud Abbas had described Israel as the "Zionist enemy." But the NPR anchor didn't tell listeners the context of Abbas' remark: Seven Palestinian children working in their families' strawberry fields had just been killed by Israeli forces.
Abbas referred to the children as "martyrs who were killed today by the shells of the Zionist enemy in Beit Lahiya." NPR reported Abbas’ comment, but did not report on the killings themselves.
Media critic Ali Abunimah of the website Electronic Intifada wrote to NPR about the piece, and two days later (1/6/05) Morning Edition aired a correction of sorts: "We could have given more context for his statement. We said it was in response to violence, but did not specify that the violence was an Israeli tank shell that killed seven Palestinians." What the correction still left out was that the Palestinians were all children, ranging in age from 10 to 17.
It’s not that NPR doesn't sometimes consider the ages of victims to be worth mentioning: A report on All Things Considered that aired the same day as the correction pointed out that Israel said the attack on the strawberry field came in response to rocket firings, "one of which injured an Israeli child." The dead Palestinians, mentioned again in that All Things Considered segment, continued to be of no particular ages.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2635
By Julie Hollar
On January 4, NPR’s Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep noted that Palestinian presidential candidate Mahmoud Abbas had described Israel as the "Zionist enemy." But the NPR anchor didn't tell listeners the context of Abbas' remark: Seven Palestinian children working in their families' strawberry fields had just been killed by Israeli forces.
Abbas referred to the children as "martyrs who were killed today by the shells of the Zionist enemy in Beit Lahiya." NPR reported Abbas’ comment, but did not report on the killings themselves.
Media critic Ali Abunimah of the website Electronic Intifada wrote to NPR about the piece, and two days later (1/6/05) Morning Edition aired a correction of sorts: "We could have given more context for his statement. We said it was in response to violence, but did not specify that the violence was an Israeli tank shell that killed seven Palestinians." What the correction still left out was that the Palestinians were all children, ranging in age from 10 to 17.
It’s not that NPR doesn't sometimes consider the ages of victims to be worth mentioning: A report on All Things Considered that aired the same day as the correction pointed out that Israel said the attack on the strawberry field came in response to rocket firings, "one of which injured an Israeli child." The dead Palestinians, mentioned again in that All Things Considered segment, continued to be of no particular ages.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2635
- Status