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Jun 13, 2010

Robert Fisk: The truth behind the Israeli propaganda (a must-read)

 


 

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-truth-behind-the-israeli-propaganda-1991803.html

 

Robert Fisk: The truth behind the Israeli propaganda

Saturday, 5 June 2010

I have, of course, been outraged at armed men boarding ships in international waters, killing passengers on board who attempt to resist and then forcing their ship to the hijackers' home port. I am, of course, talking about the Somali pirates who are preying on Western ships in the Indian Ocean. How dare those terrorists dare to touch our unarmed vessels on the high seas? And how right we are to have our warships there to prevent such terrorist acts.

But whoops! At least the Israelis have not demanded ransom. They just want to get journalists to win the propaganda war for them. Scarcely had the week begun when Israel's warrior "commandos" stormed a Turkish boat bringing aid to Gaza and shot nine of the passengers dead. Yet by week's end, the protesters had become "armed peace activists", vicious anti-Semites "professing pacifism, seething with hate, pounding away at another human being with a metal pole". I liked the last bit. The fact that the person being beaten was apparently shooting another human being with a rifle didn't quite get into this weird version of reality.

Turkish family protests that their sons wanted to be martyrs – something which most Turkish family members might say if their relatives had been shot by the Israelis – had been transformed into confirmation that they had been jihadis. "On that aid ship," a Sri Lankan texted me this week, "I had my niece, nephew and his wife on board. Unfortunately Ahmed (20-year-old nephew) got shot in the leg and now treated (sic) under military custody. I will keep you posted." He did indeed. Within hours, the press was at his family's home in Australia, demanding to know if Ahmed was a jihadi – or even a potential suicide bomber. Propaganda works, you see. We haven't seen a frame of film from the protesters because the Israelis have stolen the lot. No one has told us – if the Turkish ship was carrying such ruthless men – how their terrible plots to help the "terrorists" of Gaza were not uncovered in the long voyage from Turkey, even when it called at other ports. But Professor Gil Troy of McGill University in Montreal – in the rabid Canadian National Post, of course – was able to spout all that gunk about "armed peace activists" on Thursday.

I wasn't personally at all surprised at the killings on the Turkish ship. In Lebanon, I've seen this indisciplined rabble of an army – as "elite" as the average rabble of Arab armies – shooting at civilians. I saw them watching the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians on the morning of 18 September (the last day of the slaughter) by their vicious Lebanese militia allies. I was present at the Qana massacre by Israeli gunners in 1996 – "Arabushim" (the equivalent of the abusive term "Ayrab" in English), one of the gunners called the 106 dead civilians, more than half of them children, in the Israeli press. Then the Israeli government of Nobel laureate Shimon Peres said there were terrorists among the dead civilians – totally untrue, but who cares? – and then came the second Qana massacre in 2006 and then the 2008-09 Gaza slaughter of 1,300 Palestinians, most of them children, and then...

Well, then came the Goldstone report, which found that Israeli troops (as well as Hamas) committed war crimes in Gaza, but this was condemned as anti-Semitic – poor old honourable Goldstone, himself a prominent Jewish jurist from South Africa, slandered as "an evil man" by the raving Al Dershowitz of Harvard – and was called "controversial" by the brave Obama administration. "Controversial", by the way, basically means "fuck you".

There's doubts about it, you see. It's dodgy stuff.

But back to our chronology. Then we had the Mossad murder of a Hamas official in Dubai with the Israelis using at least 19 forged passports from Britain and other countries. And the pathetic response of our then foreign secretary, David Miliband? He called it "an incident" – not the murder of the guy in Dubai, mind you, just the forgery of UK passports, a highly "controversial" matter – and then... Well, now we've had the shooting down of nine passengers at sea by more Israeli heroes.

The amazing thing in all this is that so many Western journalists – and I'm including the BBC's pusillanimous coverage of the Gaza aid ships – are writing like Israeli journalists, while many Israeli journalists are writing about the killings with the courage that Western journalists should demonstrate. And about the Israeli army itself. Take Amos Harel's devastating report in Haaretz which analyses the make-up of the Israeli army's officer corps. In the past, many of them came from the leftist kibbutzim tradition, from greater Tel Aviv or from the coastal plain of Sharon. In 1990, only 2 per cent of army cadets were religious Orthodox Jews. Today the figure is 30 per cent. Six of the seven lieutenant-colonels in the Golani Brigade are religious. More than 50 per cent of local commanders are "national" religious in some infantry brigades.

There's nothing wrong with being religious. But – although Harel does not make this point quite so strongly – many of the Orthodox are supporters of the colonisation of the West Bank and thus oppose a Palestinian state.

And the Orthodox colonists are the Israelis who most hate the Palestinians, who want to erase the chances of a Palestinian state as surely as some Hamas officials would like to erase Israel. Ironically, it was senior officers of the "old" Israeli army who first encouraged the "terrorist" Hamas to build mosques in Gaza – as a counterbalance to the "terrorist" Yasser Arafat up in Beirut – and I was a witness to one of their meetings. But it will stay the same old story before the world wakes up. "I have never known an army as democratic as Israel's," the hapless French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said a few hours before the slaughter.

Yes, the Israeli army is second to none, elite, humanitarian, heroic. Just don't tell the Somali pirates.

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Breaking News: U.S. Discovers Nearly $1 Trillion in Afghan Mineral Deposits

 


> Breaking News Alert
> The New York Times
> Sun, June 13, 2010 -- 9:22 PM ET
> -----
>
> U.S. Discovers Nearly $1 Trillion in Afghan Mineral Deposits
>
> The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in
> untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any
> previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter
> the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself,
> according to senior American government officials.
>
> The previously unknown deposits -- including huge veins of
> iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals
> like lithium -- are so big and include so many minerals that
> are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could
> eventually be transformed into one of the most important
> mining centers in the world, the United States officials
> believe.
>
> Read More:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?emc=na
>
> -----
>
> NYTimes.com
> 620 Eighth Ave.
> New York, NY 10018
>
> Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
>
>

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Alleged Mossad spy arrested in hit-squad case | Antiwar Newswire

 

Alleged Mossad spy arrested in hit-squad case

Poland arrests alleged Mossad spy regarding hit-squad slaying of Hamas agent in Dubai

JUERGEN BAETZ
AP News

Jun 12, 2010 

More:




Peace.

Editorial Director
Michael Santomauro
917-974-6367

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Mossad spy arrested in hit-squad case

 
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The Strategic Ally Myth


 

http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2010/05/26/the-strategic-ally-myth/

 

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The Strategic Ally Myth

by Philip Giraldi, May 27, 2010

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It is difficult to understand why anyone would take Mort Zuckerman seriously. He is a New York based but Canadian born Israel firster who made a fortune in real estate before buying The New York Daily News and the US News and World Report. He now fancies himself as a leading journalist and political commentator. Zuckerman is frequently spotted on the television talking head circuit where he dispenses analysis of international events that could have been crafted in Tel Aviv or Herzliya, where the Israeli intelligence service Mossad has its headquarters.

Zuckerman's latest contribution to international harmony is a lengthy piece in the US News & World Report entitled "Israel Is a Key Ally and Deserves US Support." It is a propaganda piece that promotes one of the most persistent fictions put out by the mainstream media, that the relationship with Israel somehow benefits the United States. To give the devil his due, it is not often that an article in a national publication includes an out-and-out lie in its first few words, but Zuckerman succeeds in doing just that. As he is a smart man who went to Harvard Law School before becoming a propagandist for Israel, he must know that words have meanings. But the significance of the word "ally" must have somehow eluded his grasp. Israel is not now and never has been an ally of the United States. As Zuckerman is a lawyer he should know that to be an ally requires an agreement in writing that spells out the conditions and reciprocity of the relationship. Israel has never been an ally of any country because it would force it to restrain its aggressive behavior, requiring consultation with its ally before attacking other nations. It is also unable to define its own borders, which have been expanding ever since it was founded in 1948. Without defined borders it is impossible to enter into an alliance because most alliances are established so that one country will come to the aid of another if it is attacked, which normally means having its territorial integrity violated. Since Israel intends to continue expanding its borders it cannot commit to an alliance with anyone and has, in fact, rebuffed several bids by Washington to enter into some kind of formal arrangement.

 

The article's spin begins almost immediately thereafter in paragraph one, where the reader is informed that "the Israelis have agreed to [a Palestinian state] in principle." Zuckerman conveniently overlooks that Tel Aviv has in fact obstructed every move toward creation of a Palestinian state because that would stop its continued colonization of the West Bank and Jerusalem. He then proceeds to lay it on really thick in the next two paragraphs, where one learns that the Palestinians need to "do what the Israelis have done for decades, which is to declare…that both sides have genuine claims to this land," that the "Palestinian leadership has all along made an honorable peace impossible," and that the Palestinians are not prepared to live with an Israeli state along their borders. The Palestinians also "beat the drums of hate" and only the Israelis guarantee freedom of religion in Jerusalem. Without wishing to be too contentious, it is safe to say that everything Zuckerman writes blaming the Palestinians can easily be disputed and should be challenged.

Zuckerman then launches into one of his major themes, that poor little Israel, always willing to take risks and do what is right in the cause of peace, has been betrayed by Washington. Zuckerman opines that Tel Aviv is right to hold on to the West Bank because if it gives it up Israel will not be "secure and defensible" against Arab terrorism. He also provides a hagiography of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who apparently is "serious about making peace" and has done lots of good things for the Palestinians that he is not given credit for (except by Zuckerman). Bibi is also reported to be "disturbingly" under-appreciated by the White House.

According to Zuckerman, Netanyahu and Israel are "not to blame for trouble in the Middle East," and one also learns that "The Islamists are not enemies of America because of Israel. They are fighting America because they see the whole West…as antithetical to their own beliefs." Yes, this is the new version of they hate us because of our freedom bumper sticker. Israeli bestiality toward the Arab population that it dominates, seen on television nightly all over the world except in the US, has nothing to do with it.

After making sure that everyone knows who is completely to blame for the Middle East imbroglio, Zuckerman arrives at the argument that he knows will crush all opposition. "Israel has been an ally that has paid dividends exceeding its cost." Zuckerman asserts that seventy per cent of Washington's military aid, now exceeding $3 billion per year, is used to buy equipment made in the USA, providing thousands of jobs and making sure that Lockheed and other struggling defense contractors don't go bust. And the Israelis not only provide "access to the Red Sea," they also permit US forces to stockpile equipment in Israel for contingencies. Furthermore, Israel has been "working jointly" and "cooperating" with the US to protect America's troops all over the Middle East. And then there is all that good intelligence that Tel Aviv hands over to Washington on the many bad guys in the Near East region.

Israeli tunnel vision means that most of the actual intelligence that Tel Aviv collects is on organizations that resent being occupied or bombed by Israel, not groups that actually threaten the US, a point ignored by Zuckerman. And to those who argue that using billions of American taxpayers dollars to buy US military equipment for Israel is not necessarily money well spent in the middle of a financial crisis or that Washington's unlimited support for Tel Aviv is precisely the reason why the United States is in trouble around the world, Zuckerman delivers a final, devastating retort. Israel has an unrivaled location on the Mediterranean. Per Zuckerman "One analyst has described Israel as a 'strategic aircraft carrier'…"

Well, Mort Zuckerman is certainly entitled to his own opinion and I suppose he can use the magazine he owns to spread Israeli hasbara, but the notion that Israel is some kind of strategic asset for the United States is nonsense, a complete fabrication. Most recently, Chas Freeman has pointed out that Israel is useless for the projection of American power. The US has numerous bases in Arab countries but is not allowed to use any military base in Israel. Washington's own carrier groups and other forces in place all over the Middle East, including the Red Sea, have capabilities that far exceed those of the Israel Defense Forces. Israel has never been a strategic asset or any asset at all, always a liability. Even the stockpiles of US equipment in Israel are a typical bit of bonus support for Tel Aviv from Congress, placed there for the Israelis to use "in emergencies" while making it appear that they are for American forces. The supplies are, in fact, regularly looted by the Israelis, leaving largely unusable or picked over equipment for US forces if it should ever be needed.

 

Make no mistake, Tel Aviv is always carefully calculating how it can use Washington to further its own objectives with little regard for possible American interests. In 1967 the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty in international waters with the intention of sinking the ship and killing all the crew. During the first Gulf War Israel had to be defended by the United States. In the Cold War Israel spied aggressively on the US while cutting deals with both the Soviets and Chinese. The intelligence provided by Israel that Zuckerman praises is generally fabricated and completely self serving, intended to shape a narrative about the Middle East that makes the Israelis look good and virtually everyone else look bad – ask any intelligence officer who has seen the stuff. Israel as a key ally and security asset? A "strategic aircraft carrier"? Completely ridiculous.

Israel vs Iran: The Risk of War : ICH - Information Clearing House

 
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Mondoweiss: Don’t blame the Jews for the Israel lobby

 


Mondoweiss


Non-violence is not a principle, it is a tactic

Posted: 13 Jun 2010 10:52 AM PDT

Max Ajl, who blogs at Jewbonics, responds to Matthew Taylor's post urging non-violence in the wake of the flotilla raid:

I thought the latest post by Matthew Taylor was out of touch. I have news for him: violence works. Violence pushed Israel out of southern Lebanon, and violence repelled the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006. Violence let the Bielski partisans save our people during the Holocaust. Violence defined the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, one of the prouder moments of Jewish history. Non-violence can only be assessed conjuncturally, within a dense mesh of sociology, history, politics, and ideology. Each situation is different. There are no formulas. But we can use a rough typology of tactics. Non-violence must be pitched to appeal to either the world's conscience, or the humanity of the oppressor. It can also function as widespread civil disobedience—a general strike, for example, that can jam up the machinery of violence. These tactics are not exclusive of one another, but nonetheless it is clear that non-violence is not a principle, as Taylor raises it to. It itself is a tactic.

Taylor extracts his principle from a mis-reading of Gandhi, who supported violent resistance, and a mis-reading of Indian history. The British presence in colonial India was less than .05 percent of the population. The colonial apparatus mostly relied on the native "sepoy" army. Gandhian non-violence intended to sway that army, not the British colonizers. And that didn't work either. Japanese violence ended British colonialism, not Gandhi, and even Gandhi's non-violence worked against the looming fist of violent resistance taking place around the rest of the subcontinent.

Consider the feasibility of those options on the Mavi Marmara. Could the passengers rely on appealing to the conscience of Israeli commandoes while they were firing bullets at the activists? Taylor thinks so: "the true power of nonviolence to persuade the oppressor is unleashed with a commitment to pursue acts of courageous love." This seems wooly to me. Palestinian nationalism will be dead under a Merkava tank well before the oppressor is persuaded by local non-violent action (BDS globalizes non-violence in an ingenious way and creates a different correlation of forces, but plainly Taylor is not talking about this). Taylor instead is glossing his professor, Nagler. To say, "The point is that even if they were – while terribly difficult – the passengers could have resisted nonviolently by refusing to comply with the soldiers' demands without making any attempt to injure them," is ridiculous. When someone is shooting at you and your friends, you must disarm them, and probably use violence to do so. If you can't disarm them, you must use violence to stop them from shooting, one way or another. The demand a bullet entering your skull makes on you is for you to die, and if there is a way to "refuse to comply" with that demand, Taylor and Nagler should fess up quick.

In terms of the appeal of non-violence aboard the Mavi Marmara to the world's conscience, what is there to say? Israeli commandoes were authorized to use deadly violence, according to Michael Oren. The nine martyrs and the dozens of injured made this a major news-story, far bigger than if there had been no resistance of any sort. Did it appeal to the humanity of the world? Manifestly. There have been explosions of unrest in previously quiescent populations. The Egyptian opposition's mobilizational capacity was quite low before the massacre. In its wake the opposition has organized many amazing actions. In Istanbul and in other Muslim countries, Palestine is at the forefront of every demonstration. The Spanish government is discussing how to end the blockade. Civil society will not stop sending ships until the blockade is broken. What sort of response is Taylor looking for? A sudden "moment" when Americans rise up and overthrow our thug government for its complicity in the ongoing Nakba? Not going to happen, not yet—and those accustomed to accepting whatever hasbara Israel emits would not have changed their minds if the activists had stuck to non-violence. They wouldn't have noticed, most likely. Nagler, Taylor's mentor, acknowledges this, writing, "why was there virtually no coverage of the flotilla in the international media until the tragedy? Do we want 'if it bleeds, it leads' journalism to continue shaping our cultural narratives, constantly putting sales appeal ahead of political cogency?" ("We" don't own the press agencies. If "we" did, as Marcuse pointed out a long time ago, the revolution would have taken place a long, long time ago). Nagler wants impotent purism raised to an operational principle of the solidarity movement. Good luck with that.

Finally, in terms of jamming the machinery of occupation or violence: the passengers on the Mavi Marmara apparently did a great deal of this. They used water-hoses and repelling poles to keep commandoes off the deck. On other ships, some activists formed human chains, or jumped into the water to buy time, as Paul Larudee did. This can work, but, again, we run into the problem: the blurring of non-violence and violence. Where does disarming gun-toting commandoes fall? Violent or non-violent? Repelling their boarding vessels? Forceful or non-forceful? The Palestinian women who pushed Israeli soldiers at Budrus? Violent or non-violent? Taylor later writes that breaking windows constitutes violence. By this logic, blowing up unoccupied tanks is also "violent," and certainly, using a hammer to hit a soldier spraying bullets into civilians is also violence. Can Taylor possibly be serious about this principle, or the trouble that results when one maps non-violence and violence onto the ethical and moral spheres, and creates precise alignments between "violence" and ethical and moral rectitude, "non-violence" and ethical and moral disarray?

Taylor probably thinks that resistance on the Rachel Corrie followed his proposed path (although he doesn't mention the Rachel Corrie. Funny, that ship was barely in the news. Could that have had something to do with the presence or absence of forceful resistance?). Anyway, on the Rachel Corrie, the passengers were understandably scared and horrified, and resisted so little because they didn't want to die. This is no judgment on their bravery. But the sort of non-violence Taylor supports is the sort that castrates resistance, and takes resistance out of the realm of history and into the realm of religion. What would Taylor have recommended to the Vietnamese? There is nothing nefarious about defending oneself from armed attack. Making it nefarious writes the Palestinian right to resist out of history, reserving righteous violence and force for the Western powers that already almost monopolize it. Taylor wants to turn the fact of an imbalance of forces into a principle: don't resist. He wants to willfully "try to raise ourselves to such a cultural and moral level, both as individuals and as a community, that we would be able to control this reflex"—the resort to violence, as Chomsky wrote 40 years ago. But what Chomsky was talking about intra-communal oppression, and so intra-communal resistance.

Taylor is talking about something else entirely. He is talking about resistance to policies supported by an ideology that de-humanizes those whom it oppresses. Taylor thinks we should appeal to "Israeli public opinion," and not act as if it is "irrelevant; to do so is both a strategic and moral blunder. There's a reason that so many Israelis demonstrated in support of the IDF's actions, and I think the violence of the resisters was a huge part of it." Who is guilty of this blunder? Of course Israeli public opinion is relevant. That's precisely what BDS targets. But it targets it using a measure of coercion, because the Palestinians can't afford to wait while a militarized Sparta comes to its senses. Israeli articulate opinion is mostly upset that the assault on the Mavi Marmara didn't conform to its expectations. Does Taylor read the mainstream and right-wing Israeli press? This is a thoroughly brainwashed, militarized population. Yes, scared, not eager to join the military to brutalize and be brutalized, except the hard-right Zionists who disproportionately occupy the officer corps and make operational decisions in combat situations, but with a bunker mentality, and often, deeply racist—last week MK Ahmad Tibi was nearly assaulted in the Knesset by racist thugs for trying to deliver concrete to people without homes. Taylor writes that "We must design our activism campaigns to both end the oppression of the Palestinians AND help Israelis to feel less scared and more recognized for their humanity." What could he mean? Israelis aren't acting in a humane manner, for the most part. We can't recognize something that isn't there. And we are fantasists if we choose to believe otherwise. It is not the job of solidarity activists to heal Israeli culture. Israel is not fence-sitting. It is actively carrying out horrible crimes with the passive or active complicity of the overwhelming majority of its population. The men who wield power in that society should be facing war crimes trials, not quibbles about whether the solidarity movement is hurting their feelings. 

There is far more to say: on how Western media frames resistance, on how it accepts the Israeli narrative or the imperial narrative, on how to acknowledge this as we plan tactics and strategy until such time as we can control the narratives, on the nature of institutional and non-institutional racism vis-à-vis Western solidarity activist-based resistance and Palestinian resistance, on the naturalization of state violence, Israeli and American aggression rights, and the relentless transformation, via dominant narratives, of just resistance into unjust terror, a narrative that unfortunately Taylor strengthens.

Summing up, here's what I think. Those who resisted violently were brave. Those who resisted non-violently were brave. All were right. All were just. Solidarity organizations can agree in advance to resist or not to resist, as Taylor instructs us. But most oppression in human history has been thrown off by horrible violence. Frankly, if a man has a gun pointed at my head on my own territory and has shot the person standing next to me, and I can disarm that man, I will disarm him. And there is something surreal, if not pitiful, to demand not only that I abjure that basic human response, but furthermore, abjure it when the gun is pointed not at my head but at the person standing next to me. Writing about it admittedly makes for good copy and good employment for those living and writing in Western countries where power is eager to dissolve an internationally-sanctioned right to resist. For those living under the gun, Taylor's prescriptions may seem a little odder.

A father, 41, is killed at a Jerusalem checkpoint. Now whose story should you believe?

Posted: 13 Jun 2010 10:23 AM PDT

Haaretz reports in their article "Palestinian killed in suspected East Jerusalem terror attack":

A Palestinian driver was shot and killed in Jerusalem Friday after running over two Israeli border patrolmen, with an apparent intent to kill.

The man reportedly hit two the two policemen in East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz, with reported light injuries sustained by both victims.

According to police officials, the driver drove on a short distance, and then proceeding to flee the scene on foot. Police officers called on the suspect to stop, and opened fire at him once it was clear he had ignored their instructions.

Open and shut case, right? Not so fast. One of the notable features of the media coverage of the flotilla attack (at least online) has been an unwillingness to take the Israeli account at their word. Will this positive trend continue with other examples of Israeli violence towards Palestinians? This story presents an interesting opportunity.

Ziad Jilani obituary pictureZiad Al-Julani

First off, the driver has a name, Ziad Al-Julani (pictured right). He was 41 years old and a father to three girls pictured here. A report on Ma'an says he was a "a tradesman living in East Jerusalem's Shu'fat neighborhood." Al-Julani was killed at a temporary Israeli checkpoint that was set up in East Jerusalem following friday prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

A friend of Al-Julani's, who alerted us to the story, wrote us:

Ziad Jilani was a very family oriented man, a loving husband and a devoted father. No one who knew him believes that he intentionally tried to hit the border police at the checkpoint. I heard that a stone hit his car and caused him to swerve, starting the whole horrific chain of events. I don't know the whole story, but his wife told me that before her husband left the house that morning, they had discussed taking the kids out someplace fun that afternoon. This was no premeditated attack.

The Palestinian press is working on uncovering the story, Ma'an talks with eyewitnesses:

Sa'd Hamed As-Silwadi, from Silwan and the father of a child injured during the shoot-out, told the center he parked his car beside a butchery and saw Al-Julani driving toward the Al-Hadmi neighborhood in Wadi Joz, where he was killed.

He said he saw Al-Julani get out of his vehicle when he was first shot by Israeli forces. A relative of Al-Julani tried to help him, As-Silwadi said, but was kicked by Israeli forces. As-Silwadi returned to his vehicle to find his five-year-old child with a rubber bullet wound to the neck and head, and rushed him the Maqased Hospital on the Mount of Olives.

Ahmad Qutteneh told the center he saw Al-Julani running from four members of Israel's Special Forces, approaching him and opening fire at close range. "Then I saw one of them come near him and shoot him in the face and body," Qutteneh told the center.

Palestine Monitor helps round out the story a bit, and presents a situation where Israeli soldiers could have overreacted while under pressure from Palestinian protests:

A shopkeeper on the main street said he saw Israeli soldiers chasing ten people were shouting about the recent flotilla massacre prior to the arrival of Al-Julani's vehicle. "Look, it's every Friday like that. It's normal. The people and the army are like Tom and Jerry," said the shopkeeper, who identified himself solely as Ahmed. "But when they shot, I didn't know what's going on." Ahmed speculated that the vehicle was malfunctioning, claiming out that the prevalence of Palestinian residents in the street would prevent the driver from attempting to harm Israeli forces there.

All reports confirm that Al-Julani was killed at point blank range. His friend who contacted us said, "From what I understand, Ziad fell to the ground and the police walked up to him and fired point blank into the side of his face and body. I was told the bullets left a mark in the cement under his body." The Ma'an report adds, "Others told the center the shooter was seen 'dancing beside the body singing and cheering 'I killed an Arab, I killed an Arab'.'"

In the past, many would accept a story from the Israeli press about soldiers killing a Palestinian "terrorist" at face value. Is this still true after the flotilla?

Let's be clear: We have taken the American left

Posted: 13 Jun 2010 09:33 AM PDT

Last week we picked up Jacob Berkman's report that the Jewish leadership's inflexible support of the flotilla raid risks alienating the Jewish street, which is "conflicted" about the raid. Yes, because the left now has profound misgivings. This is from a conservative site, Human Events, smart reporting by Michelle Oddis, saying that Jewish celebs are not showing up at the pro-Israel rallies:

Politically active Jewish celebrities have remained silent regarding Israel's right to defend itself after the recent raid on a pro-Palestinian aid flotilla headed for the Gaza Strip."Unfortunately," said [screenwriter Andrew] Klavan, "I think there are a lot of Jews who don't realize that the left has left the building."

"I'm hearing from Jewish friends in show business 'Gee I went to my theater group' or 'a movie set and I heard this horrible anti-Israel stuff, what's going on?' and they don't quite get yet that the political left has left Israel behind."

The real challenge here is again to MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Your viewers/readers want criticism of Israel. Will you sound that demand in the community? (Or will you just let this site continue to grow..)

Reliable sources prove reliable on Helen Thomas

Posted: 13 Jun 2010 09:09 AM PDT

Well the battle is on inside the media, that's what's beginning to happen. I couldn't watch the Bill Maher clip, in which Oliver Stone trashes the lobby and Rachel Maddow says nothing, (per Idrees Ahmad's report). And I missed Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources, but Koozie didn't. His report:

Howard Kurtz started the show with a segment on the Helen Thomas case. Wow. Panel included Dana Milbank and Jeffrey Goldberg. Take a wild guess how Helen came out of this? Clue: comparisons were made with Ahmadinejad.

Memo to the media: 91 percent in this Washington Post poll say Thomas shouldn't have lost her job. Andrew Sullivan, the canary in the coal mine, has asked, Is there any columnist in an American paper who is against the existence of Israel? and gotten no answer.

What about a strong critic of Israel? Who on the left side is going to begin to echo the critical spirit that countless Americans are now feeling. Not Daniel Schorr, who once again blamed Hamas for the blockade yesterday. Apparently not Maddow. Certainly not Maher. Not Kurtz. The Talmud says [yes, sexist], In a place where there is not a man, then be the man. That means you, Chris Matthews.

Don't blame the Jews for the Israel lobby

Posted: 13 Jun 2010 08:34 AM PDT

At Truthdig, Zachary Karabell rightly points out that Jerry Muller's book Capitalism and the Jews completely fails to deal with the modern reality of empowered Jews in the U.S., dealing strictly with the historical backdrop. Then Karabell gets off this claim about American policy in the Middle East:

Jewish support of Israel evolved in the 1960s and 1970s into a core aspect of American grand strategy, with evangelical Christians in the United States just as adamant about that policy as any Jewish group and with the U.S. foreign policy establishment turning Israel into a key pillar of American strategy in the Middle East.

This is why Karabell, a friend of mine, called Walt and Mearsheimer's book "a terrible book" at the LA Book Fair a year or so back. And the claim doesn't bear scrutiny. Evangelical Christians had nothing to do with the pressure that caused Truman to urge Partition and then recognize Israel-- political decisions. Let's give Karabell the Cold War; but the war on terror? The braintrust of the Bush Administration included an evangelical Christian or two, but many many Jewish neocons. And Sheldon Adelson was one of Bush's biggest backers. Evangelical Christians don't give to the Democratic Party, which is now a bulwark of the lobby, c.f., Schumer, Frank and Berman. About half of the money in the Dem party comes from Jews. Karabell reflects a resistance to even talking about Jewish Establishment power. Is it mere coincidence that 3/4 of the Supreme Court picks by Democratic presidents in the last 18 years have been Jewish? Of course not. Nor that the two offices closest to Obama's are not manned by evangelical Christians, but by Jews.

Is Rahm Emanuel a Zionist? I believe so; he cavorted in the Golan recently in utter defiance of the two-state-solution, so as to cultivate Jews for the 2010 elections. Is David Axelrod, Emanuel's good friend? I have no idea. But until journalists honestly scrutinize the role of Zionism in Jewish life and American political life, we will get this kind of blame game.

'NYT' laundry service

Posted: 13 Jun 2010 08:11 AM PDT

NYT has a piece called "Gaza, Through Fresh Eyes," featuring the photography of Katie Orlinsky and an article by Ethan Bronner that then quotes Orlinsky. Watch Bronner work:

Bronner:

for nearly everyone who visits Gaza, often with worry of danger and hostility, what's surprising is the fact that daily life, while troubled, often has the staggering quality of the very ordinary. 

Funny, Orlinsky doesn't quite seem to see it that way:

"From the bullet hole in the wall above the child playing on his outdated computer in a middle-class home, to the couple having dinner sipping Coca-Cola smuggled in from Egypt, the situation in Gaza — the war, the blockade, Hamas — touches everyone," she said. "I saw energetic, smart young women learning about the world in university, and I saw young girls who spent their days sorting through trash to find reusable materials to sell to factories for a few measly shekels. I saw happy families taking a break from their daily struggle to have a picnic on the beach, and met a traumatized family who hasn't been to the beach in two years even though it's only a 15-minute drive from their home."

Oh and check out Orlinsky's photo of a Gazan widow, her husband killed by the Gaza onslaught. Magic.

The problem with soccer, redux

Posted: 13 Jun 2010 06:16 AM PDT

When I started this website more than four years ago, I got some traffic around the World Cup. I love the World Cup because it's pitched athletic competition of the highest order, with all my kumbaya stuff thrown in; and I am proudly uninformed about soccer. So to resume an old theme: We've now had seven matches. Total of nine goals. At least one on a penalty kick, one a gift. I've seen maybe two inspired goals in about five hours of soccer-watching so far (the Gerrard English goal, the Argentinian). Nine goals in 10-1/2 hours of play. Sorry folks but this is a problem.

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