Media will not allow truth about Palestinians & Israel

After the reporter for the CBS affiliate gave such positive coverage of the Palestinian solidarity rally (last Saturday) & Palestinian struggle, I emailed the news producer to commend their coverage. They responded that unfortunately she had made “factual errors that need to be corrected.” Tonight their news coverage of Palestine was as rabid as it gets, emphasizing of course the alleged Palestinian stabbing binge & neglecting to report the Israeli pogrom.

Lessons learned? Flattery will get you nowhere in politics; building BDS remains primary.

Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions against Israel is political weapon of Palestinians & it has proven effective

Don’t come to my wall badmouthing BDS as too tame & not military enough to be effective. It was called by 171 Palestinian organizations & has proven immensely effective in the 10 years of its existence. Armchair revolutionists who think they can do better than Palestinians on the front lines of the struggle against Israel will find other much more hospitable places to express their ignorant views. Here we don’t try to one-up those fighting the actual battles.

Palestinians have right to defend themselves by any means necessary

Pal with knife (AP Photo:Majdi Mohammed) Oct 19 2015

This is one slick piece of propaganda. Israel is deploying thousands of extra troops into the occupied West Bank, adding hundreds of extra police in occupied East Jerusalem, & encouraging vigilantism among armed Israeli settlers. It must be quite a spectacle to see such massive military force using tanks, grenades, live ammo against unarmed Palestinian protesters. But media chose this photo of a Palestinian in the West Bank armed with a slingshot, rocks, & a knife to document their hysterical headlines: “Terrorist stabbings have Israel on edge.”

The knife has replaced Hamas rockets as justification for shooting down & executing Palestinians. Mark Regev, the Australian-born spokesperson for the Israeli government, claims 30 knife attacks by Palestinians with 8 fatalities & “scores of injuries” since October 1st. He explains the 37 Palestinians shot dead by claiming half of them were knife assailants. It would be good if Regev could detail for us all 30 attacks since only about five have been mentioned in media–the same five ad nauseam. Is there any correspondence between the 18 or 19 alleged Palestinian assailants shot down & the stabbing scenes in Jerusalem? Or were most the of Palestinian fatalities shot down in the West Bank as they protested unarmed against armed vigilante settlers & the Israeli army?

A coalition of human rights groups (including Amnesty International) who CNN refers to as “supporters of the Palestinian cause,” issued a joint statement saying Israeli officials “have openly called for the extrajudicial killing of suspects.” They should be shouting that from the rooftops to counter Israeli propaganda.

Regev meanwhile is blasting Mahmoud Abbas (the un-elected president of the Palestinian Authority who usually runs interference for Israel) for not doing enough to stop the alleged stabbings. Abbas responded in a televised speech that Israeli attacks “threaten to ignite the fuse of a religious war which will burn everything, not only in the region (but) perhaps in the entire world.” Makes you wonder which planet he just flew in from.

Israeli policy allows demolishing the homes of alleged Palestinian assailants even if the accused have been executed & children still live there; Israeli soldiers are now allowed to shoot down rock-throwers, including children. The Israeli defense minister just asked a special meeting of the security council if they should now start confiscating kitchen knives from every home in East Jerusalem. No matter how sarcastic, the suggestion indicates the reign of terror against Palestinians will crescendo.

It doesn’t matter how many Palestinians are carrying knives because the oppressed have a right to defend themselves against military occupation & armed vigilantes by any means necessary.

Build the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel & demand no aid of any kind to Israel.

(Photo by Majdi Mohammed/AP)

PS: Israeli barcodes begin 729.

More Israeli baloney to fabricate a religious tradition in Palestine

Joseph's Tomb arson  (REUTERS:Abed Omar Qusini) Oct 19 2015

Media neglects to report on Israeli settlers torching mosques & homes in the West Bank but is making a big deal over Palestinians torching this empty car owned by settlers who were trying to take back a funerary monument near Nablus in the West Bank called Joseph’s Tomb. Several days ago, a group of Palestinians also tried to torch the cenotaph itself & this is being condemned from here to Mars as a desecration of a Jewish holy site. Is it holier than Al-Aqsa mosque to the Palestinians which Israeli police are helping extremist Israelis destroy?

Judaism’s claims to the site of Al-Aqsa hang by a Biblical thread exploited by Israeli propagandists who invented a religious tradition that does not exist for a people invented by colonialism. Not even a thread exists for Joseph’s Tomb. It’s a complete fabrication of recent vintage.

There’s no need to address the historicity of the Bible, disputes among Biblical scholars & archaeologists, or to elaborate the lengthy odyssey of Joseph. The basic narrative is that Joseph was a Hebrew kid sold into slavery by his brothers & who then rose to prominence in Egypt. When Moses led Israelites out of slavery in Egypt–the exodus story–Joseph’s bones were exhumed & carried by Moses so he could be buried in his hometown.

The Exodus story is the founding myth of the state of Israel in 1948, portrayed in the 1960 Hollywood movie “The Exodus”–a noxious & tedious romanticism of terrorism that even Paul Newman & Sal Mineo could not salvage. Once again, we needn’t challenge the historicity of the Bible but archaeologists find no evidence supporting the Exodus, let alone burial of Joseph’s bones near Nablus–Biblical events from several centuries BCE–& many have abandoned pursuit of archaeological evidence. His bones aren’t there.

No Jewish or Christian sources mention Joseph’s Tomb prior to the 5th century & the cenotaph standing now was built in the 19th century. It’s been a source of dispute between other religions but only between Israel & Palestinians since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 when Israel forbade Muslims from worshipping at the shrine & turned it into a Jewish prayer room. After the Oslo Accords in 1993, it came under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority which allows Jewish “worshippers.”

The issue is not Bible as history but Bible as Israeli politics to invent Jewish religious traditions in Palestine where they do not exist & efface Palestinian history, culture, traditions, & rights.

Palestinians torched Joseph’s Tomb, not as an act of desecration but an assertion of political rights over the occupied West Bank & over the shrine. The incident happened when Israeli settlers tried to enter the shrine without authorization & Palestinian Authority police handed them over to the Israeli army. Only a fool would believe settlers entered the shrine to worship when Israeli soldiers are taking tear gas, live ammo, & grenades after protesting Palestinians in the same area. That’s called a provocation. Just like at Al-Aqsa.

Build the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel. Continue emergency rallies all over the world in defense of Palestinian freedom of religion, to end Israeli violence, & to end the occupation.

(Photo by Abed Omar Qusini/Reuters)

A video worth a thousand media lies about alleged Palestinian stabbers

Settler shooting Palestinian (REUTERS:REUTERS TV)  Oct 18 2015

Sometimes when you read the news, especially about Palestinians, you think media must hire those who flunked out of Writing Skills 101 because you can’t make head nor tail out of what happened. There’s ‘no there there’ to the half-assed narratives. Then, in a progression from credulity to jaded wisdom, you realize they deliberately mangle the story–sometimes in grotesque but always in dishonest ways.

The lengthy Associated Press caption to this photo read: “Jewish settler holding his pistol after he shot & killed a Palestinian man is seen in this still image taken from a video shot by Youth Against Settlements & obtained by Reuters TV, in the West Bank city of Hebron October 17, 2015. Three Palestinians were shot dead on Saturday in what Israel said were thwarted knife attacks, but a Palestinian witness of one incident said it was a result of Jewish settler violence, as tensions ran high after more than two weeks of unrest. The shooting occurred near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank city of Hebron. The Israeli military said a Palestinian attempted to stab an Israeli civilian, who was carrying a gun & then shot & killed the attacker.”

Clear as mud, right? Non sequitur piled on incoherence. So it helps to have the video which Reuters TV obtained from Youth Against Settlements, a Palestinian activist group in Hebron, West Bank, which suggests the Palestinian man was executed by the settler & that Israeli soldiers tried to cover the crime by planting a knife on the man.

From the distance of the video, it isn’t absolutely clear they planted a knife but they planted something & did not render emergency care. If proper forensics were done on this crime scene, there is little doubt an execution would be proven.

We needn’t stand helpless as our Palestinian brothers & sisters are under violent siege from Israeli soldiers & extremist settlers. Continue emergency rallies & build the hell out of the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of apartheid Israel.

Please view the video to compare Reuters caption to the actual event:https://www.facebook.com/eman.qasim.18/videos/1059811567383487/?pnref=story

(Photo is still shot from video; photo posted by Reuters/Reuters TV)

The affinities between the struggles in Kashmir & Palestine

“India asks us, ‘Why do you throw stones?’ No one asks, ‘Who burned your house down?'”

Said by a Kashmiri youth, tortured in Indian detention–but could just as well have been said by a Palestinian youth.

Affinities between the struggles in Kashmir & Palestine are more than just the barbaric methods of repression & occupation used by India & Israel. Over both struggles is the pall & legacy of British colonialism. International solidarity is imperative to lay that legacy to rest.