Journalists criticize Israel’s threats against media covering Gaza flotilla
Palestine Information Center – 27/06/2011
NAZARETH — Journalists say Israel’s fresh threats to take dire sanctions against media covering the upcoming Gaza flotilla raise “serious questions about Israel’s commitment” to press freedom.
The statement issued by the Foreign Press Association in Israel was in response to a letter by the Government Press Office threatening to bar journalists joining the flotilla from entering the 1948-occupied territories for ten years.
The FPA statement says the “threat to punish journalists covering the Gaza flotilla sends a chilling message to the international media and raises serious questions about Israel’s commitment to freedom of the press”.
“Journalists covering a legitimate news event should be allowed to do their jobs without threats and intimidation,” the statement adds.
More than forty Western and Arab media outlets are set to join the flotilla.
“The Israeli threats, which conflict with all standards of human values, will not deter the peace activists on board the ships from achieving their objective of reaching Gaza, and they will not stop journalists and media organizations from carrying out their professional role in covering the international event,” said Khadir al-Mashayikh, the media official of the ship from Jordan scheduled to join the flotilla.
He called the threats “further evidence of the falsehood of Tel Aviv’s democracy claims”.
The source recalled that one of those killed during Israel’s military raid of flotilla’s predecessor in 2010 was a Turkish journalist who was filming the attack. The military force also confiscated all of the cameras on board and cut the ship’s internet connection.
“Third Palestinian Intifada” Apple App Removed
By Katy Child | IMEMC & Agencies | June 23, 2011
The technology firm, Apple have removed an application called “The Third Palestinian Intifada” for purchase for Mac, and iPhone users.
The action was taken after Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, Israeli Minister for Public Affairs and Immigrant Absorption, mailed a letter to the Apple Corporation requesting the “immediate removal” of the application.
On Tuesday, Mac officials had decided to keep the app running despite Israeli pressures to take it down. However, CNN reported today that Mac corporations have removed the application for future purchase.
Edelstein wrote that the app was “anti-Israel and anti-Zionist” and calls for an immediate Palestinian uprising against the state of Israel.
The Arabic language app was developed in Dubai to update users on upcoming Palestinian protests and news articles critical of the Israeli regime.
“The Third Palestinian Intifada” was released June 15 and was free for download from App Store until Wednesday, June 22, 2011.
The app was removed for “being offensive to large groups of people,” an Apple spokesman told Haaretz.
In May, United States attorney Larry Klayman sued Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, for over one billion dollars for not removing the Facebook group “The Third Palestinian Intifada” soon enough. [The page had a fan-base of over 300,000]
9/11 And The Orwellian Redefinition Of ‘Conspiracy Theory’
By Paul Craig Roberts | Rense | 6-20-11
While we were not watching, conspiracy theory has undergone Orwellian redefinition.
A “conspiracy theory” no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead, it now means any explanation, or even a fact, that is out of step with the government’s explanation and that of its media pimps.
For example, online news broadcasts of RT have been equated with conspiracy theories by the New York Times simply because RT reports news and opinions that the New York Times does not report and the US government does not endorse.
In other words, as truth becomes uncomfortable for government and its Ministry of Propaganda, truth is redefined as conspiracy theory, by which is meant an absurd and laughable explanation that we should ignore.
When piles of carefully researched books, released government documents, and testimony of eye witnesses made it clear that Oswald was not President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, the voluminous research, government documents, and verified testimony was dismissed as “conspiracy theory.”
In other words, the truth of the event was unacceptable to the authorities and to the Ministry of Propaganda that represents the interests of authorities.
The purest example of how Americans are shielded from truth is the media’s (including many Internet sites’) response to the large number of professionals who find the official explanation of September 11, 2001, inconsistent with everything they, as experts, know about physics, chemistry, structural engineering, architecture, fires, structural damage, the piloting of airplanes, the security procedures of the United States, NORAD’s capabilities, air traffic control, airport security, and other matters. These experts, numbering in the thousands, have been shouted down by know-nothings in the media who brand the experts as “conspiracy theorists.”
This despite the fact that the official explanation endorsed by the official media is the most extravagant conspiracy theory in human history.
Let’s take a minute to re-acquaint ourselves with the official explanation, which is not regarded as a conspiracy theory despite the fact that it comprises an amazing conspiracy. The official truth is that a handful of young Muslim Arabs who could not fly airplanes, mainly Saudi Arabians who came neither from Iraq nor from Afghanistan, outwitted not only the CIA and the FBI, but also all 16 US intelligence agencies and all intelligence agencies of US allies including Israel’s Mossad, which is believed to have penetrated every terrorist organization and which carries out assassinations of those whom Mossad marks as terrorists.
In addition to outwitting every intelligence agency of the United States and its allies, the handful of young Saudi Arabians outwitted the National Security Council, the State Department, NORAD, airport security four times in the same hour on the same morning, air traffic control, caused the US Air Force to be unable to launch interceptor aircraft, and caused three well-built steel-structured buildings, including one not hit by an airplane, to fail suddenly in a few seconds as a result of limited structural damage and small, short-lived, low-temperature fires that burned on a few floors.
The Saudi terrorists were even able to confound the laws of physics and cause WTC building seven to collapse at free fall speed for several seconds, a physical impossibility in the absence of explosives used in controlled demolition.
The story that the government and the media have told us amounts to a gigantic conspiracy, really a script for a James Bond film. Yet, anyone who doubts this improbable conspiracy theory is defined into irrelevance by the obedient media.
Anyone who believes an architect, structural engineer, or demolition expert who says that the videos show that the buildings are blowing up, not falling down, anyone who believes a Ph.D. physicist who says that the official explanation is inconsistent with known laws of physics, anyone who believes expert pilots who testify that non-pilots or poorly-qualified pilots cannot fly airplanes in such maneuvers, anyone who believes the 100 or more first responders who testify that they not only heard explosions in the towers but personally experienced explosions, anyone who believes University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Niels Harrit who reports finding unreacted nano-thermite in dust samples from the WTC towers, anyone who is convinced by experts instead of by propaganda is dismissed as a kook.
In America today, and increasingly throughout the Western world, actual facts and true explanations have been relegated to the realm of kookiness. Only people who believe lies are socially approved and accepted as patriotic citizens.
Indeed, a writer or newscaster is not even permitted to report the findings of 9/11 skeptics. In other words, simply to report Professor Harrit’s findings now means that you endorse them or agree with them. Everyone in the US print and TV media knows that he/she will be instantly fired if they report Harrit’s findings, even with a laugh. Thus, although Harrit has reported his findings on European television and has lectured widely on his findings in Canadian universities, the fact that he and the international scientific research team that he led found unreacted nano-thermite in the WTC dust and have offered samples to other scientists to examine has to my knowledge never been reported in the American media.
Even Internet sites on which I am among the readers’ favorites will not allow me to report on Harrit’s findings.
As I reported earlier, I myself had experience with a Huffington Post reporter who was keen to interview a Reagan presidential appointee who was in disagreement with the Republican wars in the Middle East. After he published the interview that I provided at his request, he was terrified to learn that I had reported findings of 9/11 investigators. To protect his career, he quickly inserted on the online interview that my views on the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions could be dismissed as I had reported unacceptable findings about 9/11.
The unwillingness or inability to entertain any view of 9/11 different from the official view dooms to impotence many Internet sites that are opposed to the wars and to the rise of the domestic US police state. These sites, for whatever the reasons, accept the government’s explanation of 9/11; yet, they try to oppose the “war on terror” and the police state which are the consequences of accepting the government’s explanation. Trying to oppose the consequences of an event whose explanation you accept is an impossible task.
If you believe that America was attacked by Muslim terrorists and is susceptible to future attacks, then a “war on terror” and a domestic police state to root out terrorists become necessary to make Americans safe. The idea that a domestic police state and open-ended war might be more dangerous threats to Americans than terrorists is an impermissible thought.
A country whose population has been trained to accept the government’s word and to shun those who question it is a country without liberty in its future.
Journalist Rasha Azab faces charges for criticising Egypt’s ruling military
Ahram Online | 19 Jun 2011
Al Fagr newspaper journalist, Rasha Azab is accused of libel by Egypt’s ruling military, who claim she published incorrect information with the aim to incite public opinion against them.
Azab, as well as Adel Hammouda, the weekly paper’s editor in chief, have been summoned by military prosecution Sunday morning (the start of the work week in Egypt) after Azab published an article in which she detailed the alleged violations by the military police against the protestors in March. Azab claims that she, herself, was subjected to torture last March.
Tens of activists and journalists gathered today in Nasr City outside the military prosecution headquarters in solidarity with Azab and Hammouda.
The protestors condemned the summoning of the journalists, clamouring that it compromises freedom of speech, especially that this is not the first time that a journalist is questioned by the military.
Israeli occupation forces arrest 72-year-old Hamas MP & lecturer
Palestine Information Center – 07/06/2011
NABLUS — Israeli occupation forces (IOF) raided the home of an elderly Hamas MP in the eastern suburb of Nablus city and detained him after blasting their way into his home.
The daughter of MP Ahmed Al-Haj, 72, told the PIC reporter, that the soldiers broke their apartment’s door in a pre dawn raid on Tuesday after encircling the building and took away her father.
She held the IOF responsible for the life of her father, who was previously held by the Israeli occupation authority on ten past occasions the latest in 2008 when he was held in administrative custody, without charge, for 15 months.
The occupation troops also arrested Hamas leader and university lecturer Dr. Mustafa Al-Shinar from his home west of Nablus city at the same time.
Shinar was frequently arrested by the IOF and was released from administrative detention in late 2009.
He wrote on his facebook page last night that reconciliation would not progress as long as political arrests continued in the West Bank. Shinar was kidnapped three times by the PA security, which negatively affected his health condition. He underwent cardiac catheterization.
In the same context, the website of Hebrew daily Yediot Ahronot said that IOF soldiers rounded up 13 Palestinians in the West Bank on Tuesday.
“Real Reconciliation Does Not Exist In The West Bank”
By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC & Agencies | June 04, 2011
Former Minister of Detainees, Hamas political official, Wasfi Qabha, stated that there are no real indications of reconciliation in the West Bank as the Palestinian security forces are still interrogating Hamas members and supporters.
Qabha told the Haas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center that “the situation has not changed in the West Bank’”, adding that political prisoners are still in prison, and more persons are being interrogated and questioned by the security forces.
The Hamas leader further stated that despite repeated promises by the Palestinian security forces to release political prisoners, the P.A is still holding captive more than 35 prisoners.
He added that he hopes all political prisoners will be released without any delays and obstructions.
“More than a month have passed since the unity agreement was signed”, Qabha said, “But most of the prisoners are still behind bars”.
Qabha also stated that such violations are against reconciliation, and that the Fateh movement of President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank must act to protect unity and national interests.
Persecution of Hamas activists continues in the West Bank
By Maureen Clare Murphy | The Electronic Intifada | June 2, 2011
While the composition of the new Palestinian Authority technocrat government is meant to be announced on 6 June, on the ground, the Palestinian Authority collaboration with the Israeli occupation and the persecution of Hamas activists continues as usual.
Ma’an News Agency reported on Sunday that the Fatah Central Committee’s Nabil Shaath said in a meeting with the Gaza government’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh that the issue of political arrests in the West Bank would soon be resolved:
“The number of prisoners has already been reduced to so few,” he said, that the underway process of setting up mechanisms for their release ahead of the unity government’s installation should be swift.
However, Hamas’ ranks in Israeli prison are swelling.
Ma’an News Agency reported today that the Israeli government extended the administrative detention of former minister and legislator Nayef Rujoub for a further six months. The lawmaker, who has been held without charge since last December, had been scheduled to be released yesterday.
On Tuesday, Israeli forces detained a car carrying four Palestinian lawmakers at a checkpoint near the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.
Ma’an News Agency reported:
Aziz Dweik, Nizar Ramadan, Bassem Zaareer, and Anwar Zboun were held at a checkpoint near Bethlehem, Hamas officials said. Nizar Ramadan was taken to an undisclosed location and Dweik was freed, Hamas officials and the Israeli military said. All four lawmakers represent Hamas in the Palestinian parliament.
Hours later, Israeli forces arrested senior Hamas official Hussein Abu Kweik. According to the Hamas-affiliated website The Palestinian Information Center:
Israel’s intelligence agency Shin Bet called Abu Kweik’s cell phone the night before and ordered him to appear at headquarters in the Ofer prison near Ramallah city.
The Hamas leader told the PIC before meeting with the Shin Bet officials that Israel is targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials in a bid to suppress their influence in the West Bank and to torpedo the recent Palestinian reconciliation accord.
He said Israel also wants to thwart Naksa day protests [on 5 June] and Hamas’s recovery in the West Bank after the reconciliation.
Abu Kweik has spent a total of 12 years detained in Israeli prisons. He survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 2002 that claimed the lives of his wife and three of his sons.
Meanwhile, Ma’an News Agency, citing the Israeli publication Maariv, reported last weekend that PA President Mahmoud Abbas – whose elected mandate expired in January 2009 – met in secret with his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres in April.
Scottish Court to Rule on Whether Anti-Israel Protesters are ‘Anti-Semitic’
By Ken Ferguson – This Can’t Be Happening – 06/01/2011
Cupar, Scotland–This county town of Fife, is not exactly a news hot spot. Probably the last big story here was the landing of Italian balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi nearby in 1785 at the end of a 43-mile flight from Edinburgh.
However the small town’s sleepy Sheriff court is about to host a key legal case involving a US student from New York and two anti Israeli protestors who have been charged with racism.
For the information of US readers, in Scotland the Sheriff isn’t some John Wayne figure with the star on his chest, but is rather the bewigged judge presiding over the local court.
This case centers on an incident at nearby St. Andrews University, where two students are facing racially aggravated conduct charges after allegedly making comments and gestures critical of the State of Israel and its flag.
Press reports are already in danger of prejudging the case, with headlines such as the one reading “St. Andrews University students in court to face anti-Semitism charges” that ran in the local daily, The Courier.
According to one of the charged students, Paul Donnachie, “Whilst in the room at the student residences of an individual who I considered a friend, Chanan Reitblat, I placed my hands down the front of my jeans and onto an Israeli flag which belonged to him, accompanied by comments to the effect that Israel is a terrorist state, and is guilty of many civilian deaths.”
He continued, “The action was not malicious. However, it sparked a great deal of political debate amongst our group of friends within our Hall of Residence, whereby the nature of the State of Israel was discussed.”
The following day, after hearing that Mr Reitblat had been upset by his actions, Paul says he “wrote a letter stating that, whilst I would not apologize for my opposition to the actions of the Israeli state, I would apologize for the manner in which I chose to mediate my political opinions on this occasion.”
Despite this conciliatory action, the following day police officers arrested both Paul and his friend Simon Colchester and held them in custody for 36 hours before they were made to appear in court charged with “threatening and abusive behaviour,” which was subsequently amended to the more sinister charge of “racially aggravated conduct,” a violation of the Criminal Law.
Basically the case turns on whether to criticize Israel or its flag is the same as anti-Semitism. The case is the more surprising, given that last year a very similar charge in Edinburgh was tossed out by the courts.
In that instance, five protestors who had disrupted a performance of the Jerusalem String Quartet in Edinburgh in 2008 were charged on a similar basis, with the state alleging that they were guilty of racism for protesting against the fact that performers in the group were also members of the Israeli military.
Dismissing the case last year, Sheriff John Scott made it clear that is entirely legitimate to criticize the Israeli state, its army or other institutions, without being guilty of anti-Semitism.
However when the two St. Andrews students were in court last month the Procurator Fiscal (prosecutor) claimed to be unaware of the earlier Edinburgh case.
Equally alarming is the fact that when protestors demonstrated outside the court, a police sergeant spoke to them warning them that he and his colleagues would not tolerate them giving “racial abuse”.
Outraged campaigners firmly told the officer that they took grave exception to the idea that they were potential racists and a protest has been made to the police chief about this.
The St. Andrews case will now be heard in late August, and since Reitblat, the American student, has now returned to the US, he will either have to be brought to Scotland, presumably at public expense, or questioned by video link.
The case comes at a time of growing support for the Palestinian case in Scotland with, for example, the country’s trade union federation, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, supporting calls for a boycott of Israeli products.
It is also potentially embarrassing for St. Andrews University, which hosts a major department which studies terrorism and which is widely funded by outside donations, including many from the US.
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The Crusades – colliding narratives
Ashes of Pompeii | June 13, 2026
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
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