[Peace-discuss] Re: [Peace] Gaza and news control

[Stuart Levy]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 05:15:03PM -0600, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> Al-Jazeera says that they're the only news organization with people in
> Gaza right now.
>
> 	http://english.aljazeera.net/
>
> But the excellent Uri Avnery writes, "The English-language Aljazeera, unlike
> its Arab-language sister-station, has undergone an amazing about face,
> broadcasting only a sanitized picture and freely distributing Israeli
> government propaganda.  It would be interesting to know what happened there."
>
> 	http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery01022009.html

(did you mean to send that one to the whole peace list?)


It looks as though Avnery is talking about their TV service, right?
(which most of us in the US can't view due to our unparallelled
freedom of speech and communication in the US...)


The Internet presence of Al Jazeera English, at least, doesn't seem to
have turned into an Israeli stenography service yet.  A couple of the
articles on their front page now seem pretty strong to me.  These were
the first two I looked at, picked from their commentary section, without
even checking who the authors were.


   "Israel's Failure to Learn"
    by Nir Rosen
   http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2008/12/20081230122143645275.html

    When George Bush, the US president, first entered the White House as the
    commander-in-chief in 2001, Palestinians were being killed in the al-Aqsa
    intifada.

    Eight years later, as Bush prepares to leave office, Israel is carrying out one
    of the largest massacres in its 60-year occupation of Palestine.

     [...]

    Terrorism is a normative term which is used to describe what the 'other' does,
    not what 'we' do.

    Powerful nations such as Israel, the US, Russia or China will always describe
    their victims' struggle as terrorism.

    However, they fail to acknowledge as acts of terror the destruction of
    Chechnya, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the repression of
    Tibetans, and the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Normative rules and what is legal and permissible are determined by the
    powerful. They formulate the concept of terrorism in normative terms and make
    it appear as if a neutral court derived such definitions instead of the
    oppressors.

    [...]

    In 1948, when Israel was being established as a new state, 750,000 Palestinians
    were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their
    villages were destroyed.

    Their lands were settled by colonists who even today deny their very existence
    and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national
    liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world.

or, this one:

    "Israel's fait accompli in Gazi"
    Eric S. Margolis
    http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/2009/01/200914102257130539.html


    [...]

    Israel's supporters insist it has the absolute right to drop hundreds
    of tonnes of bombs on 'Hamas targets' inside the 360sq km Gaza Strip to
    'take out the terrorists'.

    Civilians suffer, says Israel, because the cowardly Hamas hide among them.

    Actually, it is more like shooting fish in a barrel.

	Omitting facts

    As usual, this cartoon-like version of events omits a great deal of
    nuance and background.


    Seventy per cent of Palestinian children suffer from psychological
    trauma.   While firing rockets at civilians is a crime so,
    too, is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an egregious violation
    of international law and the Geneva Conventions.

    According to the UN, most of Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian refugees
    subsist near the edge of hunger. Seventy per cent of Palestinian children
    in Gaza suffer from severe malnutrition and psychological trauma.
     

    [...]

    When the air raids on Gaza began, Barak said: "We have totally changed
    the rules of the game."

    He was right.  By blitzing Hamas-run Gaza, Barak presented the incoming
    US administration with a fait accompli, and neatly checkmated the
    newest player in the Middle East Great Game - Barack Obama, the US
    president-elect - before he could even take a seat at the table.

    The Israeli offensive into Gaza now looks likely to short-circuit any
    plans Obama might have had to press Israel into withdrawing to its
    pre-1967 borders and sharing Jerusalem.  This has pleased Israel's
    supporters in North America who have been cheering the war in Gaza
    and have been backing away from their earlier tentative support for
    a land-for-peace deal.

    Israel's successes in having Western media portray the Gaza offensive
    as an 'anti-terrorist operation' will also diminish hopes of peace talks
    any time soon.

    [...]

    Israel is confident that its mighty information machine will allow it
    to weather the storm of worldwide outrage over its Biblical punishment
    of Gaza.  Who remembers Israel's flattening of parts of the Palestinian
    city of Jenin, or the US destruction in Falluja, Iraq, or the Sabra and
    Shatilla massacres in Beirut?

    The US media has focused on the rockets being fired on Israel from Gaza.
    Though the torment of Gaza is seen across the horrified Muslim world
    as a modern version of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising by Jews against
    the Nazis during World War Two, Western governments still appear
    bent on taking no action.