Category: In the Media

ISM Interview on Pacifica Radio Flashpoints

Interview by ISM Volunteer Haley

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Today on Flashpoints: We hear from one voice among thousands of Iraqis now fleeing the violence in their US-occupied homeland; Israel expands its bloody occupation against Palestine, we’ll have an on-the-ground report; plus, an in-depth look at the forgotten refugees of the Iraq war, imprisoned inside refugee camps on the border between Iraq and Jordan; an interview with the cheif prosecutor of the Human Rights tribunal investigating US and UN-led war crimes in Haiti; and the Knight Report. [emphasis ours]

The party line: ‘Palestinians attack, Israelis respond’

By Asa

In an attempt to disguise the current Israeli military operations in Nablus as a response to the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, the Israeli media are either directly lying that the military entered Nablus “in response to the terror attack” (Jerusalem Post) or strongly implying the same by saying the army is there “in [the] wake of [the] Tel Aviv blast” (Ha’aretz).

In actual fact, house occupations and shootings of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers in Nablus were underway well before the bombing. Furthermore, the military have been in and out of Nablus almost constantly over the last week. The Ha’aretz news timeline today directly contradicts the claim by the Jerusalem Post and even the strong implication that it was a “response” in the headline of their own story. At 12:34, the timeline refers to an AP wire report covering the military operations in Nablus: “Palestinian youth shot by Israeli troops during W. Bank protest” (note that there is no mention of the Tel-Aviv bombing in this story). The bombing does not appear in the Ha’aretz site’s timeline until over an hour after the Nablus story was filed: 13:43.

Click on this link for an image of the timeline.

It is possible that the military operation intensified in Nablus after the Tel Aviv bombing. But the Israeli media were ignoring the story about Israeli jeeps rolling into Nablus before it became possible for them to re-cast the incursion as a ‘response to terrorism’. A response to what is often characterised as ‘irrational, unprovoked, fanatical terrorism’. All this despite the fact that the Israeli army has been shelling civilian areas in Gaza for the past 12 days killing at least eighteen people, including at least two children with many more injured. We in the general public might be niave enough to think that terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians, regardless of their natonality, but it would seem that the major media defines Israeli bombing of Palestinians as “counter-terrorism” almost by definition.

Before the bombing in Tel Aviv, the story about Nablus was all but ignored by the Israeli media. This currently remains the the policy of the western media, despite the fact that the army continues to occupy as many as five houses in Nablus using them as sniper posts, and have injured at least four Palestinian young people with live rounds and rubber-coated bullets.

We have been covering this story here in the ISM Media office since 10am this morning, and have watched the hypocrisy and subservience to establishment interests of the Israeli media explicitly illustrated before our own eyes. Apparently, Palestinian lives are only of use to the propaganda system. It could be argued, however, that this position is morally superior to the position of western media agencies such as the BBC on whose radar the attacks in Nablus do not even register.

Independent: “Parents of British campaigner killed by Israeli sniper seek justice against a murderous ethos”

from The Independent

In the stifling, barren confines of the small military court room in Ashkelon, Jocelyn and Anthony Hurndall strained to hear above the noisy air conditioning as their son’s killer boasted about his accuracy as an army marksman.

They watched the Israeli soldier, clad in jeans and a t-shirt and restricted by leg irons and handcuffs, walk casually around the court.

“He did occasionally look at me but I avoided any sort of eye contact. He was just a tiny flea in the whole process of getting justice,” Mrs Hurndall said yesterday. “The responsibility goes above this soldier’s head. My anger is addressed at the chain of command.”

One split second decision by Sergeant Taysir Hayb – to take aim through telescopic sites and fire a high velocity bullet into the Palestinian refugee camp below – had irrevocably changed the lives of a family thousands of miles away in a comfortable home in North London.

Tom Hurndall, 22, a photojournalism student, first set out for Iraq, before travelling to Palestine. He had been in Gaza five days when he was hit in the head as he tried to rescue children from the line of fire. He never regained consciousness and died nine months later.

Hayb, a Bedouin Arab, claimed he had intended to fire a warning shot 10cm away. He was, he said, simply a scapegoat of the system. But he was convicted of manslaughter and obstruction of justice, and sentenced to eight years.

Back in London, surrounded by photographs of their dead son looking mischievously at the lens, the Hurndalls have taken on Tom’s passion to champion the persecuted.

The couple even talk passionately about the plight of the Bedouin Arabs within the Israel Defence Force, how they are abused, brutalised and desensitised, driven to drugs by inhuman conditions.

Mr Hurndall, a corporate lawyer, said he feels pity for his son’s killer, who he sees as a mere product of his environment. The family’s argument is not with what they see as a pawn in the game, but with those who promote an ethos where Israeli soldiers can kill civilians with little threat of prosecution.

“Our view is this soldier was doing no more than what was expected of him. It has become very clear to me that shooting civilians was a regular army activity in that area,” Mr Hurndall said.

Tom’s death was not an isolated event. Apart from the thousands of Palestinians and Israelis who have lost their lives since the beginning of the intifada, American peace activist Rachel Corrie, 23, was killed by a bulldozer less than a month before Tom was shot, while British cameraman James Miller, 34, was gunned down three weeks later. And Brit Ian Hook, 50, was leading a house reconstruction programme in Jenin the previous November when he was killed.

The Hurndalls have battled deception, indifference and constant barriers for the past three years, and now have a greater cause in mind. In an appropriate legacy to their son, they want to bring about a sea change in Gaza.

This week, they won another battle in their long war. The London inquest jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing on Tom’s death, and decreed that he had been intentionally murdered. Coroner Andrew Reid said he would be writing to the Attorney General. Yesterday, the family received a copy of the letter, in which Dr Reid asked Lord Goldsmith to use his powers to seek remedy under the Geneva Convention.

“The wider command structure within the Southern Area Command … and the Israeli Defence Force generally raise in Mr Hurndall’s case the same issues that arose in Mr Miller’s case about aiding and abetting breaches of scheduled conventions,” he wrote.

The family want those in command that day to be prosecuted either in Israel or in Britain. They hope it will start a process that will bring to an end the casual shooting of civilians with impunity.

For Mrs Hurndall, it is a long way from the day her son announced he was off to Baghdad to photograph and write about human shields. “I was frozen with fear. The words hanging in the air were ‘not on your life, over my dead body’,” she said.

From the days when his prep school headmaster praised him for battling bullies, through his years at one of the country’s best public schools, Winchester College, Tom had shown a desire to champion the weak. “For 21 years I had tried to quell his adventurous spirit. But I knew nothing there was I could say that would change his mind,” she said.

Mr Hurndall recalled yesterday his last words to his son as they stood at Heathrow airport: “I said simply ‘Come back with some good photographs’ and he just smiled.”

That day, just weeks before he was shot, he was quoted in The Independent, defending the Western human shields in Iraq.

After leaving Baghdad, Tom moved to Jordan where he met a group from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and followed them to Rafah.

The day after two Palestinian teenagers were shot and killed for no apparent reason – 11 April 2003 – the ISM team were trying to set up a tent to block Israeli tanks when Tom was shot.

It was not until his sister Sophie received a call from a newspaper informing them that he had been mortally wounded that they realised he was in Rafah.

For the next nine months they stayed by his London hospital bedside. Anthony Hurndall recounted Arsenal’s progress in the Premiership with his unconscious son. They read to him and massaged his hands and feet.

“It was a nightmare. You would wake up in the night and picture Tom in your mind. You felt you had to be there every moment of the day to work out whether he was in pain,” said Mrs Hurndall.

On 13 January 2004, Tom died. The loss of their son took the couple from their protected environment into a far crueller world. The past three years, they agreed, has proved a painful eye opener.

Mrs Hurndall said: “You imagine there is a justice for all. It has made me question the human condition. It is quite depressing that somehow we have to be tinged with some kind of suffering before we can act. That was the very question Tom asked – ‘Why don’t we act?'”

Palestinian Youth Shot by Israeli Troops

From The Associated Press

NABLUS, West Bank – Israeli soldiers holed up in a home in this West Bank city on Monday opened fire on stone-throwing protesters outside the building, wounding two people, including a 13-year-old boy, Palestinian officials and witnesses said.

Associated Press photographers and cameramen witnessed the exchange.

“When he was wounded in the neck, he ran toward me before collapsing and the blood gushed from his neck,” said Ana Maria Espinoza, a pro-Palestinian volunteer from Chile. She said more than 100 protesting youths were gathered behind a wall about 100 yards from the house, which is located in a residential neighborhood near a school.

It was unclear what the army was doing in the area, though troops frequently conduct arrest raids in Nablus, a stronghold of Palestinian militants.

The Lobby and the Bulldozer: Mearsheimer, Walt and Corrie

Published on Thursday, April 13, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
by Norman Solomon

Weeks after a British magazine published a long article by two American professors titled “The Israel Lobby,” the outrage continued to howl through mainstream U.S. media.

A Los Angeles Times op-ed article by Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot helped to set a common tone. He condemned a working paper by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that was excerpted last month in the London Review of Books.

The working paper, Boot proclaimed, is “nutty.” And he strongly implied that the two professors — Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago and Walt at Harvard — are anti-Semitic.

Many who went on the media attack did more than imply. On April 3, for instance, the same day that the Philadelphia Inquirer reprinted Boot’s piece from the L.A. Times, a notably similar op-ed appeared in the Boston Herald under the headline “Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard.”

And so it goes in the national media echo chamber. When a Johns Hopkins University professor weighed in last week on the op-ed page of the Washington Post, the headline was blunt: “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic.” The piece flatly called the Mearsheimer-Walt essay “kooky academic work” — and “anti-Semitic.”

But nothing in the essay is anti-Semitic.

Some of the analysis from Mearsheimer and Walt is arguable. A number of major factors affect Uncle Sam’s Middle East policies in addition to pro-Israel pressures. But no one can credibly deny that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington, where politicians know that they can criticize Israel only at their political peril.

Overall, the Mearsheimer-Walt essay makes many solid points about destructive aspects of U.S. support for the Israeli government. Their assessments deserve serious consideration.

For several decades, to the present moment, Israel’s treatment of Palestinian people has amounted to methodical and despicable violations of human rights. Yet criticism of those policies from anyone (including American Jews such as myself) routinely results in accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry.

The U.S. media reaction to the essay by professors Mearsheimer and Walt provides just another bit of evidence that they were absolutely correct when they wrote: “Anyone who criticizes Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle Eastern policy — an influence AIPAC celebrates — stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby.’ In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-Semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.”

Sadly, few media outlets in the United States are willing to confront this “very effective tactic.” Yet it must be challenged. As the London-based Financial Times editorialized on the first day of this month: “Moral blackmail — the fear that any criticism of Israeli policy and U.S. support for it will lead to charges of anti-Semitism — is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views. It is also leading to the silencing of policy debate on American university campuses, partly as the result of targeted campaigns against the dissenters.”

The Financial Times editorial noted: “Reflexes that ordinarily spring automatically to the defense of open debate and free enquiry shut down — at least among much of America’s political elite — once the subject turns to Israel, and above all the pro-Israel lobby’s role in shaping U.S. foreign policy.”

The U.S. government’s policies toward Israel should be considered on their merits. As it happens, that’s one of the many valid points made by Mearsheimer and Walt in their much-vilified essay: “Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided U.S. support and could move the U.S. to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.”

But without open debate, no significant change in those policies can happen. That inertia — stultifying the blood of the body politic by constricting the flow of information and ideas — is antithetical to the kind of democratic discourse that we deserve.

Few other American academics have been willing to expose themselves to the kind of professional risks that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt took by releasing their provocative paper. And few other American activists have been willing to expose themselves to the kind of risks that Rachel Corrie took when she sat between a Palestinian home and a Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza three years ago.

The bulldozer, driven by an Israeli army soldier on assignment to demolish the home, rolled over Corrie, who was 23 years old. She had taken a nonviolent position for human rights; she lost her life as a result. But she was rarely praised in the same U.S. media outlets that had gone into raptures over the image of a solitary unarmed man standing in front of Chinese tanks at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

In sharp contrast to the high-tech killers who run the Israeli military apparatus and the low-tech killers who engage in suicide bombings, Rachel Corrie put her beliefs into practice with militant nonviolence instead of carnage. She exemplified the best of the human spirit in action; she was killed with an American-brand bulldozer in the service of a U.S.-backed government.

As her parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, said in a statement on her birthday a few weeks after she died: “Rachel wanted to bring attention to the plight of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, a people she felt were largely invisible to most Americans.”

In the United States, the nonstop pro-Israel media siege aims to keep them scarcely visible.

Norman Solomon’s latest book is “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com