|
 |
||||
|
|
|||||
|
July 3, 2010 [This article from the Jewish spiritual site Tikun Olam exposes the typical Israeli government and military spin used to cover crimes against Palestinians.]Richard Silverstein (Tikun) - Border Policeman Admits Shooting Jilani at Point Blank Range During this event, the shooter [IDF soldier admitted, according to Haaretz's report , that he shot Jilani at point-blank range. He claimed, however, that he believed Jilani was a terrorist and killed him because he feared he was wearing a suicide vest. Further, he claimed he fired to protect the lives of innocent bystanders. There are a few problems with his account. First, by approaching Jilani so closely he could clearly see he was NOT wearing such a vest. Second, proper training for such an incident (and common sense) demand that an officer not approach a potential suicide bomber at close range so as not to be blown up if a detonation occurs. In other words, only a suicidal Israeli policeman would get that close to a potential bomber (or a policeman who knew the victim was NOT a bomber). Third, it should've been clear from Jilani's two previous wounds (one in his back) that if he did have a suicide vest, these bullets would've detonated it. Fourth, no border policeman would care for the lives of the Palestinians living in Wadi Joz where the killing occurred. In fact, several residents went to Jilani's assistance before he was killed and according to their accounts they were beaten by the police and shoved aside.
June 26, 2010 Dan Freeman-Molloy - Gaza Freedom Flotilla: The Israeli Massacre and the Cover-Up The precise details of the seizure and ensuing massacre remain vague. And for good reason: Israel, whose officials have for weeks been discussing diplomatic options for confronting the flotilla (whose approximately 700 participants are accompanied by some 10,000 tons of cargo), launched a media disinformation blitz parallel to the military operation. In a pattern reminiscent of the Gaza assault of 2008-9, communications from the flotilla were persistently disrupted, its satellite telephones entirely cut off just prior to the pre-dawn assault. Within Israel, the military censor moved almost immediately to prohibit reporting about details of casualties.[1] Having established a near monopoly on access to information, the Israeli government dispatched its spokespeople to tell their story.July 16, 2009 MuzzleWatch - That commenter on your blog may actually be working for the Israeli government Straight out of Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry: a new Internet Fighting Team! Israeli students and demobilized soldiers get paid to pretend they are just regular folks and leave pro-Israel comments on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. .....The approach was test-marketed during Israel’s assault on Gaza.... [They are also very active on Canadian newspaper websites. These posts are usually quite easy to spot due to the similarity in style and arguments.]
June 18, 2009 Rabble.ca - Much ado about Netanyahu All
eyes were on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu this past weekend. Would
he rise up to President Obama’s level and accept a Palestinian state,
or would he pander to his right-wing settler allies and reject a just
peace? Unfortunately, he has chosen the latter. June 7, 2009 The Tyee - Asper Nation: Canada's most dangerous media company A must read 4 articles excerped from Marc Edge's book. CanWest Global's slogan is "Inform, Enlighten, Entertain." Marc Edge frames it differently. "Canada's Most Dangerous Media Company" is the subtitle to Asper Nation, Edge's comprehensive, fast-paced, indispensable new book on CanWest Global and its founding family. Beginning today, The Tyee is publishing four substantial excerpts from Asper Nation, tracing the Asper family's political agenda, their media empire's rise, and the power it wields as the biggest of just a few Big Media owners in Canada. Also in the 'Asper Nation' Excerpted series April 25, 2009 Elmasry - How and why the media fram protesters When it comes to news coverage of protesters and demonstrations the media almost never tell us "why"... Instead of trying to shed light on these questions, the corporate media would rather marginalize the protesters by portraying them as violent, irrational troublemakers. What news we do get focuses on trivial details like how the demonstrators dress, how old they are, and what language they use. NCCAR - Palestine, Israel and the case of missing news: what Canadians aren't reading in their daily papers Canada 's national papers, The Globe and Mail and National Post: • largely ignore (only 3-4% news coverage) in the case of the Globe and Mail or, in the case of the National Post, completely omit (0% news coverage) news reports relating to certain topics such as human rights and humanitarian issues (51 reports), as well as settlements and movement restrictions (30 reports), which are key aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli impasse.
March 1, 2009 This is a must read article. The British Medical Journal exposes the Lobby's suppression of freedom of speech and describes past campaigns that have targetted this honourable publication. The current aricle is a manifesto to the Lobby essentially saying "go ahead, come after us, we are no longer afraid of you." BMJ - Perils of criticising Israel In the 60 years since the establishment of the state of Israel, attempts to present in print an account of Palestinian history and Palestinian rights have usually been met by swift and highly organised protests. Protesters have written in their hundreds to journals and newspapers, often using arguments supplied by a central publicity machine and phrased in suspiciously similar terms. These campaigns, and similar campaigns launched against publications that print material critical of Israel, seem fundamentally different from the normal discourse between readers and the publications they read. The constant use of denial rather than argument; the demands for an apology or even the editor’s resignation; the enlisting of people who have never read, or even heard, of the publication in question; and the recourse to obscenity and accusations of antisemitism all go far beyond the average heated but civilised debate one expects to find in a scientific or medical journal.
January 17, 2009 EI - Study: International law seldom newsworthy in war on Gaza Israel's recent aerial attacks on Gazan infrastructure, including a TV station, police stations, a mosque, a university and even a United Nations school, have been widely reported. Yet despite the fact that attacks on civilian infrastructure, including police stations, are illegal (Human Rights Watch, 31 December 2008), questions of legality are almost entirely off the table in the US media. January 9, 2009 Rabble.ca - Turn off the Canadian media, please In the face of a major ongoing crime like that of Israel's siege and assault on Gaza, Canadians turn to the Canadian media in good faith to try to learn and understand what is happening, who is to blame, and what they might be able to do to help the victims. On each of these counts, the Canadian media fails. A friend of mine, Brooks Kind, spent some time going through the least biased of the Canadian media, CBC radio, over the past two weeks. He found that the CBC suppressed crucial facts, presented an unrepresentative spectrum of opinion and falsified the historical record. The suppressions and omissions are in the service of the perspective of the U.S. and Israeli governments (and Canadian politicians), but they are no less false for that. With the reminder that I am picking on the CBC not because it is the worst, but because it is by far the best, here are just a few examples. October 2008 The following article was actually published in the Guardian, in the UK on September 29th. I have been holding it for a few days hoping that it would be reported by Canadian media. It has not. It would seem that they are more interested in reporting the rantings of the neo-cons (including our own de-facto Liberal leader Irwin Cotler) against Ahmadinejad rather than real news like what the man actually said. Here it is, from a very reliable source - the Guardian. Guardian, UK - Ahmadinejad accepts Israel's right to exist Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made a remarkable announcement. He's admitted that Iran might agree to the existence of the state of Israel. Ahmadinejad was asked: "If the Palestinian leaders agree to a two-state solution, could Iran live with an Israeli state?" This was his astonishing reply: If they [the Palestinians] want to keep the Zionists, they can stay ... Whatever the people decide, we will respect it. I mean, it's very much in correspondence with our proposal to allow Palestinian people to decide through free referendums. August 12, 2008 Greg Felton - Human Rights Tribunals neither good nor bad—just necessary, unfortunately For this position to be valid, the right of free speech must be raised to the level of a categorical imperative—a standard valid for all speech.... Let’s say a magazine or newspaper published a factual, investigative article about the similarities between Israel and Nazi Germany, Israel’s systematic killing and torture of Palestinian children, or The Lobby’s corrupting influence in our government and media. Would The Lobby’s media tyrants abide by Maclean’s high-minded ethic? Of course not. Informed dissent against Israel or The Lobby is deliberately ridiculed and demonized as “hate speech.”
July 24, 2008 PTT - Media manipulations: The child was called a murderer while the soldier was called a `boy' One of today’s main articles on the Guardian reads ‘Israel exchanges Lebanese murderer for bodies of two captured soldiers’.... The Guardian never forgot to describe in detail what Kuntar might have done to deserve the prison sentence, but it did not mention any of the Israeli soldiers' atrocities against the Lebanese and the Palestinians. Such method of writing is to charge the readers with hate against one side, while adding a peaceful innocent victim mask on the other... People usually scan the titles of newspapers, not many read the rest of the article. And after a few headlines of this kind, you can't help but to swallow a ready canned lie, and consider one side guiltyand the other innocent. One wonders whether the ethics of journalism has disappeared, or just lost its way.
June 8, 2008 Information Clearinghouse - Tutu's Trip to Gaza Censored by the US Media When Nobel Laureate and world renowned peacemaker Desmond Tutu goes to Gaza
to visit the site of an Israeli massacre; that's news, right? So why is it
impossible to find any account of his trip in America's leading newspapers?
Is it because any information that is incompatible with the territorial
ambitions of the Israeli leadership is simply "disappeared" into the
media-ether? March 2008 Counterpunch - How to be An Israeli Journalist: Never Write "Murder" or "Palestine" When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim : ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.' Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them' .... When the Palestinians aren't making claims , their viewpoint is simply not heard. CPNO - Ten rules for reporting on the Middle East conflict
Rule # 1: In the Middle East, it is always the Arabs that attack first,
and it's always Israel who defends itself. This is called
"Retaliation". Glasgow Media Group - Bad News from Israel NOTE: This is an important and thorough study of the Brithish media done in 2004. The findings clearly apply to the Canadian media and western media in general. The study suggests that television news on the Israel/Palestinian conflict confuses viewers and substantially features Israeli government views. Israelis are quoted and speak in interviews over twice as much as Palestinians and there are major differences in the language used to describe the two sides. This operates in favours of the Israelis and influences how viewers understand the conflict. If Americans Only Knew - New York Times Distortion Up Close and Personal A little over a week ago, some members of our organization, If Americans Knew, met with New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent to discuss the findings of a detailed study we had completed of two years worth of Times news stories on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Okrent was going to be writing a column discussing the paper's coverage of Israel/Palestine, and we felt our study would be an important resource. CPNO - The Media and the Palestinians It is no secret that the North American media has played a major role in the unresolved assault on the Palestinian people. The pro-Israel bias is evident throughout the print and television media, not so much by what is said but by what is not said: the history and context of the crisis is never presented. September 2005Hagada Hasmalit Israel - Sharing the Joy What
the Israeli media represented as chaos, loss of control, looting etc.
looked to my eyes like a spontaneous expression of joy by Palestinian
masses who were finally relieved of the punishment of the Israeli army
of occupation.
|