War against Palestine

[Ghulam Mustufa]

This website contains tons of information,and tells of which companies and household brands that support
and fund the Israeli terrorists.

www.inminds.com/boycott-israel.html

[Ghulam Mustufa]

For 10 years Tim Llewellyn was the BBC's Middle East correspondent. In this passionately argued polemic he accuses British broadcasters, including his former employer, of systematic bias in covering the Arab-Israeli conflict, giving undue prominence to the views of Jerusalem while disregarding the roots of the crisis

Sunday June 20, 2004
The Observer

Since the Palestinians began their armed uprising against Israel's military occupation three years and eight months ago, British television and radio's reporting of it has been, in the main, dishonest - in concept, approach and execution.

In my judgment as a journalist and Middle East specialist, the broadcasters' language favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is shown, most especially on mainstream bulletins, as a battle between two 'forces', possessed equally of right and wrong and responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence.

That 37 years of military occupation, the violation of the Palestinians' human, political and civil rights and the continuing theft of their land might have triggered this crisis is a concept either lost or underplayed. Nor are we told much about how Israel was created, the epochal dilemma of the refugees, the roots of the disaster.

Legions of critics have formed similar views and put them to the BBC and ITN, to no avail. In my case, the BBC, who employed me for many years in the Middle East, was no doubt able to categorise me as a veteran journalist who had spent too long in the region, though executives are always polite and prompt in their replies. Even making such criticisms carried the risk of my being labelled parti pris. (BBC producers are instructed not to mention that I was a BBC Middle East correspondent on air, in case my views might be associated with the BBC.)

Now comes hard evidence to support these views, gathered by Greg Philo and his Glasgow University Media Group, who have monitored and analysed four separate periods of BBC and ITN coverage between late 2000 and the spring of 2002. Bad News From Israel makes the scientifically based case that the main news and current affairs programmes - with the rare exception, usually on Channel 4 - are failing to tell us the real story and the reasons behind it. They use a distorted lens.

The result is that the Israelis have identity, existence, a story the viewer understands. The Palestinians are anonymous, alien, their personalities and their views buried under their burden of plight and the vernacular of 'terror'.
The Israeli view, the study finds, dominates the coverage. There is far more coverage of Israeli deaths than Palestinian, even though far more Palestinians have died, and they have the evidence that unerringly shows it. Israeli violence is tempered not only by the weight of coverage but by the very language used to describe incidents.

One example is a template for hundreds: when Israeli police killed 13 Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin in October 2000, inside Israel, soon after the armed uprising in the occupied territories began, BBC and ITN coverage was a fifth of that given to the Palestinians who stormed a police station in Ramallah a day later and murdered two captured Israeli soldiers. These Palestinians were 'a frenzied [lynch] mob... baying for blood'. No such lurid prose was used to describe the Israeli killing of their own citizen Arabs.

In the Israeli reprisals that followed the Ramallah killings, ITV said the Israelis were 'abandoning their restraint'. This was after two weeks in which Israeli forces had killed 100 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

Cause and effect, the Philo team finds, are misreported. Why does the 'cycle of violence' start, for example? In October 2002, the BBC repeatedly referred to the killing of the Israeli tourist minister as the reason for Israeli army reprisals against Palestinian towns and villages. It did not mention the fact that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had killed the minister in reprisal for the Israeli assassination of its leader.

As Philo shows, the cycle is always shown as Palestinian attack and Israeli reprisal. Broadcasters consistently fail to suggest that it might be the military occupation that engenders armed resistance, or that Israeli actions may be such as to provoke Palestinian violence. The study finds that the daily despairing and degrading consequences of living under military occupation are rarely reported.
And while there is constant reference to Israeli security and Israel's right to exist, there is little mention of Palestinians' security or their right to exist.

[Ghulam Mustufa]

contd.............


A former news agency bureau chief, based in Jerusalem, sums it up: '[British TV] cover the day-to-day action but not the human inequities, the essential imbalances of the occupation, the humiliations of the Palestinians.' He also quotes a BBC journalist, who tells him TV centre does not want 'explainers... it's all bang-bang stuff'.

Almost as importantly, the Glasgow volume also shows the results of this coverage and how badly it serves the public who pays for it. The team interviewed many people, of different backgrounds, regions and ages (the study explains fully its focus group methods and practices), whose views of the conflict, as seen through TV, are closely analysed. Two examples: of groups of British students interviewed in 2001 and 2002 only about 10 per cent knew it was Israel that occupied Palestine - most believed the Palestinians were the settlers and it was they who occupied Israel. In 2002, only 35 per cent of the British students questioned knew that the Palestinians had suffered far greater casualties than the Israelis.

This ignorance among people who rely on TV for their information about the world is not surprising: Bad News reveals that between 28 September and 16 October 2000 BBC1 and ITN devoted 3,500 lines of text to the crisis in Israel/Palestine - 17 of which were devoted to the history of the conflict.

Since Philo and his team finished their analysis, little has changed. So far, criticism has been deflected. Mostly as a result of pro-Israeli pressure, a Middle East ombudsman has been appointed by the BBC, who will report by the end of the year; and organisations such as Reporting the World try professionally, by example and by discussion, to suggest how the TV companies might improve their coverage.

I am not confident of change. The reasons for this tentative, unbalanced attitude to the central Middle East story are powerful. BBC news management is by turns schmoozed and pestered by the Israeli embassy. The pressure by this hyperactive, skillful mission and by Israel's many influential and well organised friends is unremitting and productive, especially now that accusations of anti-Semitism can be so wildly deployed.

The general BBC and ITN attitude is to bow to the strongest pressure. The Arabs have little clout in Britain, and their governments and supporters have much responsibility to bear for not presenting their side of the story and for abysmal public relations.

After Hutton, the BBC's tendency to sniff the wind from Downing Street on such a sensitive foreign story, where the line is taken from Washington, has been intensified.
There is still an inbuilt cultural tendency in broadcasting newsrooms, easily exploited, to see the world in terms of 'them' and 'us', the carnage in an Israeli shopping mall still somehow more evocative and impressive in news terms than the bomb that devastates the shabby apartments in an Arab slum. The events of 11 September 2001 reinforced this endemic bias. It is easier to invoke Islamic extremism or al-Qaeda or ask why there is no democracy in Palestine than go to the awkward heart of the matter.

The TV companies' reluctance to view the crisis, as they once did, from inside and across the Arab world as well as from Israel, and their failure to base a senior and credible team in the occupied territories, mean that the crisis is consistently viewed from the ambience of Israeli west Jerusalem. Here, it is easy for Israelis to shape the views of the western journalists who live among them, or, conversely, threaten those who step out of line.
Orla Guerin, the BBC's fearless and candid Middle East correspondent, drew on herself not for the first time unwarranted Israeli wrath recently when she reported how the Israeli army had kept a Palestinian boy in a bomb belt waiting at his, and everyone else's, peril while the camera crews showed up. She told viewers, 'these are the pictures the Israelis wanted the world to see'. The Israelis did, of course, but they did not want such frank exposure of their cynicism.

Just before the invasion of Iraq last year, a BBC current affairs documentary (not mainstream news) exposed Israel's unadmitted nuclear weapons programme, a rare if very late-evening example of the corporation risking Israel's displeasure. The Israeli authorities threatened to expel the BBC's Jerusalem bureau and boycotted its news teams, only lifting their strictures when BBC management appointed a monitor of all the corporation's Middle East coverage. His findings will appear later this year, but there is no doubt he exists as a result of pressure from Israel and its powerful friends in Britain.

There is currently also froideur between the BBC and Israel's government over an interview aired on 30 May with the nuclear weapons whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu. A foreign ministry spokesman has accused the BBC of breaking Israeli law because Vanunu's freedom depended on his having no contact with foreigners. Here, Israel may well have gone over the top.

Israel's hysterical reactions to frank and critical reporting show the uselessness of British broadcasters' trying to appease Israel by constraining and falsely 'balancing' coverage. Spin doctors and media bullies must be seen off whether they are in Westminster or west Jerusalem. Nervousness in London has caused tension between reporters on the ground and their managements as the news teams try to survive the trigger-happy Israeli army, a paranoid Israel government and their own masters' tentativeness.

This thoughtful Glasgow study does offer some hope. It found that the images of this crisis, of tanks, jet fighters and helicopter gun-ships in lethal pursuit of terrified civilians, many of them women and children, have brought home to viewers that a grave injustice is being committed in Palestine. They are just not quite sure what it is. The words our broadcasters so often use to explain those images stand in the way of of them, as if to try to block them or ameliorate them, rather than tell of the horror they signify.

• 'Bad News From Israel: television news and public understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict', by Greg Philo and the Glasgow University Media Group, is published by Pluto Press (£10.99) on Tuesday.

[Ghulam Mustufa]

Palestinians Blast Israeli Bid To Block Aqsa Restoration


Al-Musalla Al-Marwani features Islamic and Byzantine architecture and covers a total area of 2775 square kilometers

By Atef Daghlas, IOL Correspondent

NABLUS , July 2 (IslamOnline.net) – Palestinians reacted with anger to Israeli army’s attempts to stop restoration works inside Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site.

Israeli soldiers attempted to storm Al-Musalla (the prayer hall) Al-Marwani on Tuesday, June 29, and end by force the restoration work there.

But they were confronted by scholars and officials of the Palestinian Islamic Waqfs Department.

The Palestinian officials repudiated Israeli army claims that they did not get a prior permission for the restoration.

Mohamed Hussein, the director of Aqsa mosque, said the work is not meant to stem the flow of water into the Islamic site during the rainfall season.

He said the officials and workers for the project stood their ground against the Israeli occupation forces and resumed work normally, calling the attempt "continuous and brazen interference".

"The occupation forces had earlier poked their nose into other administrative and architecture-relate affairs of the mosque. They even interfere in the entry of worshippers into the mosque."

On April 12, at least 70 Palestinians were injured when Israeli forces stormed into Al-Aqsa mosque compound and clashed with worshippers.

"Entitled"

Ikrema Sabri, the mufti of Al-Quds and Palestine , dismissed claims that an authorization was required for the restoration of the prayer hall.

"The Islamic Waqfs Department is empowered to have the restoration and renovation works done and has never asked for permission from occupation authorities or municipal officials to do this," he said.

Sabri stressed that the act of the occupation forces is rather part of a policy of provocations and interference in the affairs of Aqsa mosque.

Adnan Al-Husseini, the director of the Palestinian Islamic Waqfs Department, agreed.

"The restoration operations we carry out are vital for limiting the flow of water into the prayer hall".

He charged that Israeli forces have attempted to "use the policy of force to terrorize employees of the Islamic Waqfs Department in order to stop their works."

Plots

Al-Aqsa Society of the Reconstruction of Islamic Shrines warned in a statement, a copy of which was obtained by IslamOnline.net, against fresh attempts targeting Aqsa mosque in general and Al-Musalla Al-Marwani in particular.

"We value what the scholars, officials and employees have done but fear other Israeli schemes against Al-Aqsa mosque, particularly Al-Musalla Al-Marwani," read the statement.

The society referred to earlier reports that a group of Israeli forces, including senior officers, broke into the mosque and the prayer hall where they stayed for two hours.

Al-Osboa newspaper had reported that the occupation forces moved a monitoring camera from outside the wall of the mosque to inside the site near Al-Musalla Al-Marwani.

"The question now is: why is it moved adjacent to the Al-Musalla Al-Marwani?" the statement asked.

"The Israeli establishment is creating a media fuss about the southern and eastern walls of Al-Aqsa mosque next to Al-Musalla Al-Marwani. Some reports speak about recommendations recently submitted to Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon to close down the prayer hall and denied Muslim worshippers access."

Long History

Al Musalla Al Marwani is situated at the south east of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

A wide structure with Islamic and Byzantine architecture, Al-Musalla Al-Marwani comprises 16 rooms, with a total area of 2775 square kilometers.

The Crusaders had called it "Solomon's Staples" and dedicated it for their horses.

It had been closed due to the damage of its walls, but was re-inaugurated in 1996 following some restoration work initiated by Sheikh Raed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement inside what is now Israel , who is currently detained by Israeli authorities.

Israel claims Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site, was built on the so-called Temple Mount , an allegation refuted by scores of historians.

An Israeli extremist group, the Temple Mount Faithful, has for long been pressing successive Israeli governments to allow a replica of the said temple.

Archeologists said the ongoing Israeli excavations have already weakened Al-Aqsa Mosque’s foundations.

A part of the road leading to one of the mosque’s main gates had recently collapsed because of the incessant Israeli excavations.

[Zaynul]

Must read article

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Lessons Not Learned
7/2/2004 - Political - Article Ref: IV0407-2371

By: Kim Petersen
Iviews* -




It is a classic no-brainer. If one party decides to give your homestead to another party and that party then violently forces you and your family out, then by all means you are likely to resist and fight to regain what was rightfully your place of abode.

Palestine is a land that was promised by Britain to Zionist Jews, who proceeded to usurp the land for themselves and ruthlessly drive the Indigenous Palestinians out. It is little wonder then that the original inhabitants were not happy. Very few people would have been happy if it had happened to them.

Now when Saddam Hussein drove out the Kuwaiti royalty and annexed Kuwait, the US was quite perturbed and stated that this was unacceptable and it would take action against this territorial expansion; and it did. The hypocrisy was strikingly manifest when compared to the contradictory stand taken vis-a-vis East Timor years earlier. Official documents show that the US "offered full and direct approval to Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor." (1)

The US reversed itself on East Timor and the Indonesian facts-on-the-ground were effaced. So it is galling that President George Bush saw fit to, in defiance of international law, approve the ethnic cleansing and annexation of territory seized in the war of 1967. UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 call on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories and in return receive guarantees of security from Arab nations.

Bush's move flies completely in the face of his strident challenge to the UN prior to aggressing Iraq. Bush said then, "All the world now faces a test ... and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"

But Bush's fondness for Israel is not an aberration in the US. In Washington the Israeli land theft was congressionally approved by a vote of 407 to 9. The measure was understandably lauded in the Israeli government. (2)

The Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer in an ebullient flash of intellectuality chimed, "The president believes that this plan will make a real contribution toward peace and so do I."

One can surmise that as long as the root causes that filliped the terrorism continue to fester that another backlash is in the offing.
So a vision of the way to peace is laid out: invade, ethnically cleanse, occupy, and annex another's territory and one will be contributing to peace. The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon sought to demonstrate through a series of ten propositions the axiom that property (i.e., ownership of territory) is impossible. Among the propositions were property as homicide, the devouring of society, the mother of tyranny, and the negation of equality. Property in Proudhon's thesis was summed up as theft. (3) Little did Proudhon realize that through theft comes peace.

Al Qaeda considers otherwise. US support for Israel is identified as a major issue triggering terrorist attacks against the US and its allies. (4) If Whitehouse officials were to give serious consideration to what fuels Osama bin Laden's anger at the US other than Bush's feeble proffering that the enemy hates freedoms enjoyed by American citizens (which Bush apparently does also as evinced by the Patriot Act) then the security sought by Americans as well as Israelis and Arabs might be addressed. Territorial theft can only exacerbate the justifiable outrage felt by those dispossessed.

The outrage culminated in a terrorist attack on US soil on 9-11. One can surmise that as long as the root causes that filliped the terrorism continue to fester that another backlash is in the offing. Violent theft is likely to be reciprocated with violence. For the violence to end the violence of the usurpers must stop and the theft must be undone. Bush doesn't seem to have taken the wisdom of his favorite philosopher to heart. When Jesus was about to be arrested an apostle drew a sword and attacked a guard. Jesus reproved, "Put your sword back in its place, for all those who take up the sword perish by the sword." By logical extension those who live by violent theft will also suffer violent theft. Israel and the US are the architects of their own insecurity.



References ;


(1) Agence France Presse, "US Endorsed Indonesia's East Timor Invasion: Secret Documents," Common Dreams, 6 December 2001.


(2) Haaretz Service and news agencies, "Israel hails House vote on Bush Mideast stance," Haaretz, 24 June 2004.


(3) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government p 3, 5.


(4) James Bamford, A Pretext For War (Doubleday, 2004) p 96, 138-139, 144, 210-211, 237, 239, 248.



Kim Petersen is a writer living in Nova Scotia, Canada. He can be reached at: [e-mail].

Source: Dissident Voice

[Zaynul]

What We Saw In Palestine More Than Disgusting
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“There is no legitimacy to destroy children's bedrooms, to explode bombs inside houses, to destroy even the toys of the children,” Mike charged


Additional reporting by Ahmad Maher, IOL Cairo Staff

CAIRO, March 6 (IslamOnline.net) – They have decided not to sit in the audience seat any longer and to take their case to the occupied Palestinian territories, where they can stand witness to unbridled Israeli aggressions on Palestinian cities and help defend the unarmed Palestinians in their uphill struggle against the armed-to-the-teeth Israeli occupation troops.

Paul, an American, and Mike, a Swiss, were driven by a strong desire to expose the injustice done to the Palestinian people, so that they can keep world public opinion's interest alive, fearing that the looming U.S.-led war on Iraq would “steal the limelight.”

“This is my 8th time in Palestine. I was one of 7 wounded in April 1st in Beit Jala by Israeli bullets. My country is leading the injustice here in Palestine, and most of the Americans don't know that,” Paul, who holds a Ph.D. from George Town University in Linguistics, told IslamOnline.net Live Dialogue on Tuesday, March 5.

“I have an obligation because I know the truth. So I have to report it. We participate in non-violent resistance with Palestinians,” he stressed.

Echoing the same voice, Mike, a 20-year-old Sociology and Political Science student at Zurich University, charged western media of biased and unfair coverage of the Palestinian cause.

This, he stressed, made him well determined to have a hands-on experience on the appalling conditions suffered by the Palestinian people day in and day out.

“It is my third time in Palestine now. I felt a strong need to see what really is going on in Palestine, because I am not convinced of what the mass media are writing about regarding the Palestinian issue. After the first visit I felt a responsibility to return and participate with ISM (International Solidarity Movement).

Barbaric Treatment


“My country is leading the injustice here in Palestine,” said American Paul


They familiarized IslamOnline.net about the barbaric treatment Palestinian elderly, women and children received at the hands of Israeli soldiers.

On Monday, Paul and Mike went to the Old City of Nablus, which came under a brutal Israeli aggression during which Israeli soldiers abducted Palestinians and captured up to 15 Palestinian female school children to use them as human shields.

“I went to a family where the father and 3 of his children were deaf. The soldiers have been there for a day and a half, and broke and damaged everything in the house.

“The most important thing is that they took the hearing aids of the father and the children and crushed them with their boots. Also they broke into a cabinet where they stole all the savings (in cash and gold) of the whole family.

“I got shot at several times when I was witnessing the Shabab defending themselves with stones against the occupiers, and finally in the afternoon when I was in the clinic of Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, the soldiers threatened to blow up some walls in order to enter the clinic,” Paul recalled.

They, in effect, do not want to repeat the situation of Jenin last April when no one from outside was there to witness what was happening.

“We want to be sure that in every place in Palestine, someone is there to observe what happens under the dangerous conditions of war in Iraq,” the two peace activists underlined.

“I visited dozens of houses that were occupied in the Old City today, especially in the Yasmia quarter, and what I saw was more than disgusting.

“There is no legitimacy to destroy children's bedrooms, to explode bombs inside houses, to destroy even the toys of the children,” Mike charged.

“What about taking the hearing aid from deaf children, and crushing it with their boots? What about not just turning everything up-side-down, but destroying even frames of the beds, mirrors in bathrooms? What about spraying walls with Stars of David, or with writing in Hebrew letters, saying "This is our house"? Mike pressed.

As the Israeli tanks and tractors went non-stop with demolishing houses, the Palestinian people are chilled to the bone in such frosty weather conditions at that time of the year, the remarked.

Mike says families are in a dire need for many blankets and sometimes there are not enough heaters.

The latest Israeli incursions into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he said, added insult to injury and left scores of people exposed to merciless elements.

[Jamil]

The mass media dosent tell us any of these stories.The yahoods obviousley pull the strings.