The one comment Nic made was to dispute Meshaal’s assertion that they (Hamas) provided captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit with Glasses which were provided to them by his parents. But that is not what Meshaal said. I can understand Robertson misunderstanding Meshaal but CNN’s website contains the same mistake and attributes it to Meshaal as a quote.
From CNN’s Website
When he asked us to bring him a medical glasses for his sight, we did so as humanitarian duty. We treat Gilad Shalit in a humanitarian way that is in line with the Palestinians’ morals,” he said.
What Meshaal actually said was “when he asked us to bring to him medical glasses for his sight, we did our humanitarian duty“.
My assumption from that was that they provided him with glasses, although not the same glasses that the family provided. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports why this would be the case.
Last year, Shalit’s captors refused to accept a pair of eye glasses sent by his parents because they feared they were embedded with miniature electronic devices.
I had great hopes for this 6 hour documentary because Christianne Amanpour was doing it. I also had great reservations since this was still CNN. This was still US media, especially US television.
One easy prediction to make was that any exposure of the truth about Israel and it’s US supporters would result in campaigns and a total assault on the program, CNN and Christiane Amanpour. And so it has begun, led by CAMERA, the Zionist lobby’s media arm.
Both proved accurate. Amanpour did an amazing job on many levels. The US audience was allowed to see things generally underreported in the US.
We saw connections between US politicians and illegal Israeli settlements.
We saw US politicians using campaign contributions to send to Israel to support illegal settlements.
We saw Christian zionists in all their glory.
We saw Jewish terrorists.
We saw the power of the Israel lobby, especially AIPAC but including the Christian Zionists, in Washington.
We saw what happens to politicians who place justice or US interests before AIPAC or Israeli interests.
We saw lots more.
But
We saw it all within the context of “response”. We saw it all in the context of “revenge”. The narrative that Israelis, Jews, settlers, terrorists, are all responding to the threat posed by Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general was pervasive.
Although we saw one Palestinian home spared from demolition, we did not see or hear about the thousands of others which are not.
Finally we saw nothing of the daily terror inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli army every day.
All in all it was fantastic. See for yourself if you missed it. The other two parts will follow.
CNN International acknowledged the arrest of over 200 before releasing 250. They also acknowledged that there are some 11,000 prisoners in Israeli prisons.
Thank you Atika Shubert. I do not believe that Ben Wedeman would ever have reported it that way. It will be interesting to see how regular CNN and all the other US broadcast media handle it.
In a report airing this morning on CNN, reporter Cal Perry produced a story on the weekly demonstrations in the Palestinian village of Bilin. The demonstrations include large numbers of villagers from Bilin and internationals (including Israelis), who make a statement against Israel’s so called “security fence” which Israel is building on Palestinian land.
He never mentions that the wall/fence
–steals enormous swaths of Palestinian land,
–separates Palestinians from each other
–the wall/fence has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice at the Hague.
The segment was introduced as a piece on “violent vacations”, referring of course to the internationals, especially US residents who travel to the West Bank to support Palestinians in their normally peaceful protests against a policy of ethnic cleansing by the state of Israel. The usual motivating factor as stated by one of the protestors is the fact that Israel is the highest recipient of US foreign aid in the world.
The same demonstration was filmed by the protestors. It shows clearly that there were a large number of Palestinians present which contradicts the impression given by CNN that the protest was organized by internationals looking for a thrill.
It also shows clearly that much of the Israeli fire was unprovoked, contadicting the assertion that the fire was in response to stone throwing. At one point the tear gas lands right in front of the camera.
CNN for its part focused on the internationals and the stone throwers. It has been proven on many occasions that stone throwing is discouraged by the Palestinians and by the internationals. In fact it has also been established that the Israeli army sends in undercover Israeli soldiers or agents of the prison service to provoke Palestinian children to throw stones.
Several masked mistaravim (a Hebrew term meaning ‘those who pretend to be Arabs’), undercover agents belonging to the Israeli Prison Service started to behave aggressively and threw stones at the soldiers. When the Palestinian villagers called on them to stop using violence and to leave the demonstration, they revealed their identity, pulled out their weapons, and arrested two Palestinian and four Israeli demonstrators.
CNN also states that each stone is responded to with a shot of tear gas. In fact the tear gas and the rubber bullets are fired whether stones are thrown or not. As you can see from this video, the Israeli army does not need to be provoked.
Finally, without the presence of internationals, it is highly likely that the bullets used by the army would not be rubber. In fact Israeli novelist Yitzhak Laor, writing in “Counterpunch†the amount of force used by the Israeli army at the beginning of the intifada before any Palestinian picked up a gun.
A month after the Intifada began, four years ago, Major General Amos Malka, by then No. 3 in the military hierarchy, and until 2001 the head of Israeli military Intelligence (MI), asked one of his officers (Major Kuperwasser) how many 5.56 bullets the Central Command had fired during that month (that is, only in the West Bank). Three years later Malka talked about these horrific figures. This is what he said to Ha’aretz’s diplomatic commentator, Akiva Eldar about the first month of the Intifada, 30 days of unrest, no terrorist attacks yet, no Palestinian shooting:
Kuperwasser got back to me with the number, 850,000 bullets. My figure was 1.3 million bullets in the West Bank and Gaza. This is a strategic figure that says that our soldiers are shooting and shooting and shooting. I asked: “Is this what you intended in your preparations?” and he replied in the negative. I said: “Then the significance is that we are determining the height of the flames.” (HaAretz, 11.6.2004).
It was a bullet for every Palestinian child, said one of the officers in that meeting, or at least this is what the Israeli daily Maariv revealed two years ago, when the horrible figures were first leaked.
Approximately 300 Palestinians were killed during those non violent demonstrations. The international community did nothing.
It’s all so pathetic. From Michael Chertoff’s gut feeling about a terror attack this summer to the constant breaking news every time someone sneezes the wrong way on a plane; Americans have to be numb by now to the scare tactics of the administration and the exploitation by the networks.
Joe Scarboroough is priceless here, ridiculing CNN.
CNN’s Ben Wedeman presents the conflict between Palestinian cave dwellers and Israeli settlers as a typical case of old traditions giving way to modern development. The reality is that the Israeli settlements are illegal and are built and expanded in order to steal Palestinian land and displace Palestinians.
Also missing from Ben Wedeman’s report is the abject violence used by the Jewish settlers against Palestinians in this area.
CNN
I spent time in Tuwane, a cave dwelling village south of Hebron, in 2003. I was there in conjunction with the Israeli organization Taayush. Our purpose was to protect the Palestinians from the settlers who were building an “outpost”. Jewish Settlers would show up over shabat to terrorize the people of Tuwani for the purpose of driving them out. Israeli border police often provided protection for settlers who were stoning Palestinian children on their way to school or beating Palestinian adults. Our prescence reduced the risk for Palestinians but by no means eliminated it.
On Sept. 29, masked men, clothed all in black, came down from the direction of the Jewish settlement colony Maon Farm, and attacked Kim Lamberty, 44, and Chris Brown, 36, both US citizens working with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). At the time of the attack, they were escorting Palestinian children to school on a path where the students often face stone-throwing and other attacks from the militant settlers of Maon. The five assailants were armed with chains and baseball bats. Brown sustained a facial laceration and a collapsed lung. The men bashed him with chains and kicked him with their boots. They threw Lamberty to the ground, breaking her knee and arm. The victims were on the ground 30 minutes before they were evacuated to the Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva, Israel. The children ran away during the assault.
In February, 2006, former President Jimmy Carter, who expertise with regard to the Middle East is respected almost everywhere but the United States, warned that, “My concern is that in order to try, on behalf of the United States and Israel, to punish Hamas, we’ll actually going to be punishing the Palestinian people who are already living in deprivation. And it’s going to turn the Palestinian people even more against the West and against Israel, against us and make Hamas seem to be, you know, their only friend. So this will strengthen Hamas and weaken the Palestinian people. I think it’s a counterproductive ploy to try to punish Hamas.”
Don’t Punish the Palestinians
By Jimmy Carter
Monday, February 20, 2006; Page A21 The Washington Post
CNN’s Cristianne Amanpour
Gaza: Another Mess Made in U.S. Tony Karon a journalist from Capetown, South Africa
Everyone following the conflict in Gaza knows full well that the reason for the violence is not that Palestinians have not “sorted out their politics†— they’ve made their political preferences abundantly clear in democratic elections, and later in a power-sharing agreement brokered by the Saudis. The problem is that the U.S. and the corrupt and self-serving warlords of Fatah did not accept either the election result or the unity government, and have conspired actively ever since to reverse both by all available means, including starving the Palestinian economy of funds, refusing to hand over power over the Palestinian Authority to the elected government, and arming and training Fatah loyalists to militarily restore their party’s power. Unfortunately, after three days of some of the most savage fighting ever seen in Gaza, that strategy now lies in tatters. Fatah is, quite simply, no longer a credible fighting force in Gaza, where it has long been in decline as a credible political force.
In it’s comparison CNN leaves out the some basic similarities and some very important differences. For example, te fact that both live under a brutal Israeli occupation is never mentioned. Neither is the fact that Israel supported the creation and funding of Hamas. It’s another case of blowback.
Active in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas wants to liberate all of Palestine and establish a radical Islamic state in place of Israel. It is has gained notoriety with its assassinations, car bombs and other acts of terrorism.
But Sharon left something out.
Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.
Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),” said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.
Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” said a former senior CIA official.
According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were “weak and dormant” until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.
After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da’wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.
“Social influence grew into political influence,” first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement’s spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.
According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini’s Iran.
As a new contributer this site, I thought that a good way to start would be to go through interesting videos in the backlog of old clips. This one is from CNN back in December 2, 2006 of Jimmy Carter defending his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It’s still worth watching — a good one for sharing with friends who don’t know the basics of the situation maybe.
I’m not a fan of Jimmy Carter (or politicians in general for that matter), but these days he has, in some respects, began to tell it like it is regarding Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. The furious reaction of the political elite the US to his book — in which it seems he simply tells some basic truths — was instructive.
In the clip he says that “there is zero debate in this country about this issue and that’s what I hope to change.” An admirable and much-needed goal, to be sure. And the good thing about Carter speaking about this issue is that he gets mainstream attention in the US.
I have not read his book, but aparently it is not without its flaws — and not the fake “errors” its Zionists critics allege. Likewise, Carter makes at least one questionable statement in the clip:
“Inside Israel it is a wonderful democracy with everyone treated the same, Arabs and Jews…”
