An Afterword on Viva Palestina Breaking the Siege of Gaza

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Friday July 17, 2009 · 2:15 PM PDT

2009/07/17 · 14:15

Thank you for recommending my diary on the Viva Palestina convoy which crossed the Egyptian border into Gaza on Wednesday in its campaign to break Israel's blockade. I was amazed by the response, as I pressed "Publish Diary" fully expecting to be flamed.

There has been an unmistakable change of heart at dailykos. Three years ago I was in Europe during Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and wrote a dailykos diary deploring those attacks. To my shock, I was pressured to delete it, which I did. It was only on return to the US that I realized almost no one here had seen footage of the massive explosions and bodies of children being carried out of buildings and the general carnage in Lebanon. But that footage was carried everywhere on European television.

In the comments there were many intelligent counters to the apologists for Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and little need for me to echo their answers. As a sort of meta-comment, I notice that most of the responses in Israel’s defense were either red herrings or ad hominem attacks on people like George Galloway and Cynthia McKinney.

Several people asked for an action list. Here are a few suggestions, ranging from the easiest to the most difficult:

earthtokosmos

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Wednesday July 15, 2009 · 6:10 PM PDT

2009/07/15 · 18:10

If the United States had a state-mandated news blackout on coverage of the Viva Palestina US convoy, which has been kept waiting for 10 days with 50 trucks of humanitarian aid at the borders of Gaza, it could not be less visible to the public.

But the convoy has confirmed that its 200 members, plus at least some of the vehicles, finally crossed into Gaza through Rafah, Egypt, in the last few hours. It is one of the most important MIddle Eastern stories of the year: the second convoy led by British MP George Galloway and many other noted peace activists to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, one of the harshest long-term abuses of any people on the planet. Despite the presence of Galloway, four anti-Zionist rabbis, a US general, and some 200 other people from the US, this important development has been nowhere on the mainstream press's radar, even in the "humanitarian news" section of Reuters. But you can get a few details at Chinese Xinhua.

earthtokosmos

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Sunday January 04, 2009 · 9:59 AM PST

2009/01/04 · 09:59

Israel is engaged in a worldwide PR blitz to whitewash the crushing of a trapped population on a strip of land smaller than Jackson, Mississippi by one of the largest military forces in the world. But even without this concerted "re-branding," the very verbs, nouns, and adjectives of the English language must cry out at the way they have been corrupted in press discussions of Israel's brutal assault.

We know Gaza is one giant jail with Israel sealing all entries and exits, banning imports of medicines and food, blocking access to the sea, yet Israel continues to get away with blaming Hamas's "rocket attacks" for its bombing campaign, and now, its ground invasion.

In a statement on Sunday, Nobel Laureate and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said the assault on Gaza "bears all the hallmarks of war crimes."

earthtokosmos

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Thursday March 13, 2008 · 4:48 PM PDT

2008/03/13 · 16:48

When I first overheard the news reports about Eliot Spitzer's leisure time pursuits, discovered by chance through a federal wiretap of his cell phone, two words stood out for me: "prostitution" and "ring." Without having the details, I thought at the very least he must have been found running a prostitution ring, or using public funds to cover his own dates.

That's why I was caught short when I actually read the articles. Collectively there was no doubt they added up to a press-kit story. How did the word "ring" get included as an implied part of Spitzer's offense instead of "escort service"? Who was it that decided the women were "prostitutes" instead of "call girls"?

earthtokosmos

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Wednesday July 18, 2007 · 11:26 AM PDT

2007/07/18 · 11:26

A little-noted resolution in the House of Representatives was passed July 11, remarkably, by a vote of 414-0, with a few members, including Dennis Kucinich, not voting, and two Republican members voting only "present."
Now placed on the record is 414 Congress members' condemnation of the University and College Union of the United Kingdom's (UCU's) support for an international boycott of Israel academics until it halts its systematic oppression of the Palestinian people.
The targets of the condemnation are two resolutions adopted by the UCU in May.

earthtokosmos

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Tuesday March 13, 2007 · 1:30 PM PDT

2007/03/13 · 13:30

Some ominous mailings turned up in my mailbox this week. I publish an obscure legal newsletter that has nothing to do with international politics. But yesterday I received two semi-glossy flyers—essentially 8 1/2 x 11 postcards—from The Israel Project.

They resembled the strident, fearmongering election literature you might see against abortion or gun control.

earthtokosmos

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Wednesday July 19, 2006 · 7:45 PM PDT

2006/07/19 · 19:45

I still recall the first big story I wrote as a journalist, in 1983, because I had moved to Washington with fantasies of being an investigative reporter and making a difference. But I was given a challenge: I was asked to "report" on a story while being told what to write at the same time. And the story back then was that Medicare was going broke. Don't ask for the numbers, it just was. So, needing to pay the rent, I did what most journalists do, and forgot about fact-finding so I could stay on message. Whatever reporting I managed to do was molded to fit.

Many other journalists did the same thing, because there were choruses of stories pronouncing something that wasn't true but that would help the Reagan administration start dismantling publicly funded health care. We didn't think of ourselves as resembling Pravda writers from the 1960s.

The reporting on Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza strikes me as very similar. There is something very trumped-up-from-nowhere about this whole affair, and the media are dutifully reporting it in lockstep.
Read More

Post-Thanksgiving, send a prisoner a dictionary

earthtokosmos

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Saturday November 26, 2005 · 4:13 PM PST

2005/11/26 · 16:13

There are so many outrages to keep left-wingers busy that's it's easy to lose sight of the national disgrace represented by American prisons. A terrible milestone of sorts is on the horizon: At some point in the next several months, the United States is likely to execute the 1,000th death-row inmate since the execution of Gary Gilmore reopened capital punishment in the United States in 1977.

One of the many problems that have grown worse since privatization made prisons a lucrative industry is that prison library budgets have shriveled away. But if you have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, you know just how transforming books can be to people who have every reason to give up hope.

While in prison, Malcolm X taught himself to read, literally, by starting on page one of a dictionary and going through it word by word. In his chapter, "Freedom through learning to read," we discover how the dictionary we take for granted as a reference tool was the doorway to his career as one of the most influential civil rights figures of the century. Read More

Katrina Slush Fund

earthtokosmos

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Sunday September 18, 2005 · 11:08 AM PDT

2005/09/18 · 11:08

I just returned from a trip to Phoenix, during which I took a drive through the city's South Mountain Park, a swath of the Sonoran Desert that is the largest municipal park in the country and the starkly beautiful home to more species than anywhere else in North America.
At the summit, called Dobbin's Point, and elsewhere in the park, stand stone outposts and visitor facilities constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1937 and 1942, when the unemployed were paid $30 a week to blast the route of the steep winding road up, and were grateful to get the work. Still solid, a lasting testament more than 60 years on to what government money can do.
Curious about just how much money $200 billion is, I checked and found the entire US defense budget for 2005 is $407 billion. What the Katrina reconstruction budget amounts to is about half of that --only slightly less than the defense budgets of Russia, China, the UK, and Japan COMBINED.
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An Afterword on Viva Palestina Breaking the Siege of Gaza

BREAKING--literally--the siege of Gaza

Tutu on Gaza massacre: "All the hallmarks of war crimes"

Why is Spitzer gone but not Vitter?

All in favor of a military strike against Iran....

That war behind the curtain

The Off-Message Truth

Post-Thanksgiving, send a prisoner a dictionary

Katrina Slush Fund