Reflections on the Bombardment & Invasion of Gaza
We interrupt the schedule of planned posts to draw your attention to the latest issue of the London Review of Books (Vol. 31, No. 2 - 29 January 2009)---
In a post at the end of last year on the Israeli military assault on Gaza I wrote: "I am absolutely convinced that the mass media in this country is constitutionally unable to provide anything remotely resembling fair coverage of what is going on in Gaza...." We now have sufficient evidence for the truth of that claim courtesy of Henry Siegman in the latest issue of the London Review of Books:
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any...has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. [....] [emphasis added]
Read the article by Siegman for the specific reasons as to why each of the aforementioned Israeli claims is not true. And then read, on the LRB website, "Responses to the War in Gaza" by Tariq Ali, David Bromwich, Alastair Crooke, Conor Gearty, Eric Hobsbawm, R.W. Johnson, Rashid Khalidi, Yitzhak Laor, Yonatan Mendel, John Mearsheimer, Ilan Pappe, Gabriel Piterberg, Jacqueline Rose, Eliot Weinberger, and Michael Wood.
In a post at the end of last year on the Israeli military assault on Gaza I wrote: "I am absolutely convinced that the mass media in this country is constitutionally unable to provide anything remotely resembling fair coverage of what is going on in Gaza...." We now have sufficient evidence for the truth of that claim courtesy of Henry Siegman in the latest issue of the London Review of Books:
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any...has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. [....] [emphasis added]
Read the article by Siegman for the specific reasons as to why each of the aforementioned Israeli claims is not true. And then read, on the LRB website, "Responses to the War in Gaza" by Tariq Ali, David Bromwich, Alastair Crooke, Conor Gearty, Eric Hobsbawm, R.W. Johnson, Rashid Khalidi, Yitzhak Laor, Yonatan Mendel, John Mearsheimer, Ilan Pappe, Gabriel Piterberg, Jacqueline Rose, Eliot Weinberger, and Michael Wood.
posted by Patrick S. O'Donnell at 1:41 AM
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Al Jazeera has released exclusive footage from Gaze with the intention of telling these stories to the world, especially Western media. The footage is of broadcast quality and available for free under a CC BY license: http://cc.aljazeera.net/
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