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Alison Weir at Stanford
Remembering Muhammad Al-Durrah... and the hundreds more
As we mourn Muhammad Al-Durrah, killed by Israeli forces 21 years ago, I’ve been remembering two small personal incidents related to the boy's death.
The first one occurred a few months after his killing. I had gone to the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a freelance reporter to see for myself what was going on. At one point I was walking around the area of Gaza where the boy had been killed. A man came up to me and said he was the cameraman who had filmed the incident.
He told me that afterward Israel had claimed that their soldiers had not shot the boy and that the footage was fraudulent. He was extremely angry at Israel’s misrepresentation of the death and of their outrageous accusations of journalistic malpractice. (By the way, these israeli claims were finally laid to rest in 2013.)
The second incident provides a window into news coverage of Palestine:
Three years later I was in the Palestinian Territories again, and had gone to the AP bureau in the West Bank to interview the bureau chief about their news coverage.
While I was sitting in front of the editor's desk, he received a phone call from a contact in the field. After he hung up, he explained that it was a report about a boy who had just been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
He phoned the report into the control bureau for the region, which is located in West Jerusalem and staffed by journalists living in Israel; many of them Israeli and/or with Israeli families. I later wrote about the incident in this piece, and in this one, which contains the boy’s photo.
That night I was watching CNN news back at my hotel and noticed that there was no report about this murder of a young boy. I had no doubt that if the murder had been of an Israeli child it would have been feaatured.
I phoned CNN (I believe their London headquarters) and told them I was in the West Bank and had a news tip: a 12-year-old boy had been killed earlier that day by Israeli soldiers.
The woman on the phone said: “I know, I’ve seen the footage.”
I was startled and said: “But I’ve been watching CNN, and I haven’t seen any report about it.” She answered in a regretful tone: “I know… “
She told me that she had been the one who had gotten them to broadcast the footage of Mohammed El-Durrah. She implied that she wasn’t likely to succeed with this one…
And she didn’t.
While we’re mourning Muhammad, let’s mourn all the other hundreds of children also killed by Israeli forces, whose deaths were never shown on TV... and the hundreds more that will come in the coming weeks, months and years… until enough of us around the world finally say
No More.
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PrintAbout my article on the Taylor Force Act
I feel deep sadness about all the deaths described in my article, The strange, sad saga of the Taylor Force Act....
Please see IfAmericansKnew.org for my main page
I write very little on this blog. My main work is at If Americans Knew.org. My articles are here. It's also important to subscribe to our new blog, here, to see a frequently updated compendium of news and analysis. We also post on our Facebook page often. (Another organization I'm connected with is Council For the National Interest.)
Bill Weinberg's flawed journalism
The problem is that there is no such If Americans Knew flier. Poor Mr. Weinberg, in his agony over those not marching to his own tune, simply got things wrong...
Orlando Sentinel Op-Ed: U.S. massive aid to Israel must stop: My Word
The ADL claims that Israel is a strategic asset. In reality, Israel is a tiny nation with few natural resources; it has long been subsidized by Americans; it has spied on us; and it has stolen U.S. technology. Israel attacked a U.S. Navy ship in 1967, killing 34 and injuring 175. Israel then paid $6 million compensation for a ship worth $40 million. The survivors of the attack are calling for a public investigation...
ADL, Hate Group – Why many people call the "Anti-Defamation League" the "Defamation League"
The ADL has a pattern of attacking people who provide facts they dislike about Israel-Palestine. A great many of the diverse organizations, writers and speakers who provide significant, factual information about Israeli oppression and violence against Palestinians – including Jewish individuals – are called "anti-Semitic."
The diverse movement for justice
I'm on a speaking tour in the northeastern United States and am being hosted in the homes of a wonderfully diverse array of committed, principled human beings – religious and secular; Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other; old and young. This is representative of the extraordinarily diverse collection of people working for justice in Palestine, who are of all ethnicities, races, ages, faiths, and political backgrounds...
Some of the articles I'm reading today
• Analysis: Emerging Iran deal is not a 'sword at Israel's throat' - Jerusalem Post
• They're Palestinians, not 'Israeli Arabs' - LA Times
• Olmert [former Israeli Prime Minister] found guilty of taking cash for personal gain - JTA
• Danny Schechter Was an Observant Jew, Even if he Rarely Set Foot in Shul: Journalist and Radio Legend Dies at 72 - Forward
(I met Schechter once and am sad to learn of his death. He was often critical of Israel; it's unfortunate that the Forward does not include that aspect of Schechter's activism in this article.)
• Juan Williams: Boehner, Israel and race - The Hill
• Rumor Control: Contra NYT, Iran Didn't Renege on Shipping Uranium - Huffington Post
Recent articles of interest
Some articles I'm reading today:
http://goingtotehran.com/snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory-the-case-for-u-s-iranian-rapprochement-that-obama-must-still-make-leveretts-in-the-national-interest
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/26/new-low-obama-doj-federal-courts-abusing-state-secrets-privilege/
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/American-Israeli-Rabbi-compares-Obama-to-Haman-395457
http://www.brussellstribunal.org/article_view.asp?id=2200#
http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/new/netanyahus-spying-denials-contradicted-by-secret-nsa-documents/#.VRfx22YmRNI
‘New anti-Semitism’ on college campuses is largely blowback against orchestrated Israel advocacy
...in the case of UCLA, there is a back-story to the "anti-Semitic" questioning, namely Hillel’s role in funneling Milstein’s money into student elections. Although this history has been excluded from the multiple stories about the incident, we believe that Milstein’s intervention through Hillel led to the student interviewers’ doubts about Hillel officer Rachel Beyda’s judicial impartiality...
The advertisement that the American Historial Association (AHA) refused to publish
While everyone talks about the Israeli election, this is being ignored...
Recent news from the International Middle East Media Center, IMEMC (ignored by US media. Imagine the coverage if Palestinians had taken these actions against Israelis):
A viewpoint from Prince Turki re: blogger punishement
...you have to consider the problem from two points of view. The first point of view is that are we going to have an independent judiciary or not, and if we do have an independent judiciary whatever comes out of that then you have to live with it and try to improve it through education, through reforms of the judiciary, better understanding of the world today, etc..... we’ve already started even before the present King came to power on a reform program for our judiciary – literally scores if not hundreds of sitting judges in Saudi Arabia that have been taken by this reform program to visit other countries to see how their judicial systems work..... My gut reaction to a man being lashed - It’s the same gut reaction that I got from seeing how those people in Abu Ghraib prison were treated by American soldiers in 2004 and 2005. It is the same gut reaction that I get even today from seeing people that have not been put on trial, that have not been charged with anything incarcerated still in Guantanamo. So it is not an issue that is unique to Saudi Arabia. If there is injustice in the world it happens in other places. What we are doing at least about it is we are trying to reform our judicial system, and hopefully we can get there sooner than people give us credit for.
This video and article are essential to understanding Israel
From Electronic Intifada http://youtu.be/pen3Ka5IaR0 Note: This video shows disturbing footage of Israeli police shooting and killing a Palestinian youth. At least thirty Palestinian citizens of Israel were arrested in the Galilee village of Kufr Kana on Sunday as protests spread over the cold-blooded police killing of a youth on Friday. The video above shows Israeli police shooting 22-year-old Kheir Hamdan in Kufr Kana in circumstances that totally contradict their initial account...
JTA: "Supreme Court justices talk Jewish"- Kagan calls Rabbi Riskin (currently founder of notorious West Bank settlement) "gracious"
In a JTA article this week, Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan talk about the significance of their Jewish upbringing, of having 3 Jewish Justices on the US Supreme Court, and of Judge Kagan's debt to Rabbi Shlomo Riskin (who has since founded a particularly notorious West Bank settlement). They fail to discuss the significance of having no Christian Protestant justices on the Supreme Court (the largest religious group in the US), no Muslim Supreme Court Justices (Muslim-Americans are about equal in number to Jewish-Americans), no Buddhist Supreme Court Justices, etc....... Justice Breyer serves on Israeli board....
PBS and NPR appear to have collaborated on their responses to the David Brooks controversy
Updated on Friday, October 17, 2014 at 08:49AM by
[Alison Weir
Updated on Friday, October 17, 2014 at 10:07AM by
[Alison Weir
...UPDATE, 11am Pacific time: Mark Memmott has just emailed me: "I’ve had no contact with PBS. I’ve actually never met Sara Just, as far as I remember, and have not had any email correspondence with her. I have to think that they agreed with what I wrote and decided to (mostly) reissue it." I find it disconcerting that PBS's Sara Just didn't attribute her statement to NPR's Memmott; this seems dangerously close to plagiarism. I wonder how she learned of his statement? I'm also curious about why she removed a small but significant portion of what he had written. Please read on:
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NPR's standards editor & ombudsman minimize and/or ignore NPR ethics requirements regarding David Brooks
Now I've also been in touch with NPR's Standards and Practices Editor, Mark Memmot, who is in charge of ensuring that NPR journalists adhere to ethics standards. Last week NPR's ombudsman's office sent me an email that contained a statement by Mr. Memmott. I discussed this statement in a previous post and now will expand on this a bit more, specifically including information about NPR's own ethics code...
NPR covers for David Brooks
Following is an email to me from the Office of the Ombudsman, and below that is my response...
Will PBS now follow NYT lead on disclosing David Brooks' conflict of interest?
The New York Times ombudsman ("public editor") has now said that the Times should disclose to readers the fact that the son of columnist David Brooks, who often comments about Israel, is serving in the Israeli military. Ethics codes require such disclosure. So far, however, PBS has stated nothing about this, despite the fact that Brooks regularly appears on PBS and was commenting on Israel during its most recent massacre in Gaza, while not disclosing that his son was at the time serving in the Israeli army...
