When the Qatar-based pan-Arab Al-Jazeera Satellite Television announced two years ago plans to launch Al-Jazeera International (AJI), many people around the world hoped the new satellite channel would provide a genuine alternative to the notoriously biased western media, which often operates under Zionist influence. The new channel, the launching of which has been postponed several times, will provide both regional and global perspective to a potential audience of hundreds of millions of English speakers. AJI has already attracted a number of luminaries in the world of TV broadcasting. Read more about Pro-Israeli editors seek to influence Al-Jazeera International English Satellite TV
Dahr Jamail is an award-winning, independent journalist who reported live from Baghdad for eight months in 2003. He is considered one of the best sources on the war in Iraq. Recently, he returned to to the Middle East, traveling to Syria. While in Damascus, the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah began. Jamail left immediately for Beirut and sent daily dispatches from his Iraq-dispatches website. Christopher Brown received the chance to speak to Jamail about what he saw during this 34-day conflict in the Middle East. Read more about "The world just sat by": Interview with Dahr Jamail
I’m always fascinated with the birth of a meme. A new one recently surfaced amid the vitriolic rhetoric that gets dished out by the neoconservative punditry of the Internet: “Hezbollywood.” Google it and be in awe of its (as of this writing) 131,000 results. I’m almost surprised that Google even bothers to ask, “Did you mean: Hollywood?” Of course not. Right now, right-wing word herders are singing “Hooray For Hezbollywood!” And why not? In one simple word, they can summarize an entire paranoia. Read more about The creation of "Hezbollywood"
As the Israeli war on Lebanon continues to dominate world headlines, Israel’s nearly one-sided war against Gaza seems to be taking place in a relative media blind spot. United Nations humanitarian agencies estimated on August 3rd that 1,050 Israeli artillery shells were fired into Gaza in the preceding week and “…since 28 June, 175 Palestinians have been killed, including approximately 40 children and eight women, and over 620 injured in the Gaza Strip… Palestinians have fired on average between 8-9 homemade rockets per day towards Israel (319 in total) and the Israeli military has fired on average 200-250 artillery shells per day into the Gaza Strip and conducted at least 220 aerial bombings.” Read more about Behind the media's Gazan blind spot
Israel complains endlessly about how Hezbollah and Hamas refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist. The truth is that no major Israeli party believes in a viable Palestinian state. Just who is denying whose right to exist is clearly stated in the following direct excerpts from the platforms of Israel’s most powerful parties, Labor, Kadima and Likud. The parties’ platforms illustrate the discourse of Israeli politics - a discourse that witnesses no recognition of Palestinian identity, and is based on the denial of Palestinian rights - to Jerusalem, to return - and upon the artificial maintenance of “demographic” barriers in order to preserve an ethnically exclusive state. Read more about The Truth of Israel's Intentions
In the wake of the most serious outbreak of Israeli/Arab violence in years, three leading U.S. papers—the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times—have each strongly editorialized that Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon were solely responsible for sparking violence, and that the Israeli military response was predictable and unavoidable. These editorials ignored recent events that indicate a much more complicated situation. As we recently noted, the portrayal of Israel as the innocent victim in the Gaza conflict is hard to square with the death toll in the months leading up to the current crisis. Read more about Down the Memory Hole
As Israel destroys Lebanon, the words of right-wing pundits, however indicting, crude or inhumane, do not necessarily warrant the most concern. They hail from a realm intellectual poverty, hatred and from the most unimaginative strain of racism. What is more concerning are those who purport to represent a liberal pacifist left, but who exploit catastrophes to advance subtle agendas; those who recoil at the words of Likud party hawks, then meet them for lunch an hour later. If the name Yossi Beilin comes to mind, then read no further. Read more about Dovetailing violence
The media assumption is that in withdrawing from Gaza in September 2005, Israel ended its conflict with at least that portion of Palestine and gave up, as Schieffer put it, “what the Palestinians supposedly wanted.” In reality, however, since the pullout and before the recent escalation of violence, at least 144 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed by Israeli forces, often by helicopter gunships, according to a list compiled by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem. Only 31 percent of the people killed were engaged in hostile actions at the time of their deaths, and 25 percent of all those killed were minors. Read more about "Because This Is the Middle East"
The Daily Mail’s Richard Pendlebury reported on 15 July: “Visiting the towns in northern Israel I could understand the sense of vulnerability they feel.” He added that “all I can report is what I have seen on the Israeli side of this seemingly intractable, ongoing conflict …” However, the Guardian’s Middle East editor Brian Whitaker wrote on 17 July: “Viewed from Lebanon, the TV coverage of destruction in Israel, in terms of the amount and the tone, seems wildly out of proportion compared with what is happening across the border.” Read more about Disproportionate number of British journalists in Israel versus Lebanon
Nazareth hit the international headlines for the first time in this vicious war being waged by Israel mostly on Lebanese civilians. Reporter Matthew Price, corsetted in a blue flak jacket in Haifa, told BBC viewers that for the first time Hizbullah had targetted Nazareth late on Sunday. “Nazareth is a mostly Christian town”, he added. Before the strike close to Nazareth late on Sunday night, several Arab villages in the north had been hit by Hizbullah rockets trying to reach these factories. The BBC saw the need to mention these attacks nor the fact that “mostly Muslim” villages had been hit. So why did the strike against Nazareth — and its mistaken Christian status — became part of the story for the BBC? Read more about Notes from northern Israel: In the line of media fire
