The brothers have returned from the tarbiyyah camp over the weekend in Leicester. This years camp was themed around topics that would assit in the ‘fortification of the da’ee’.
June 23, 2009
Working with the Media - A New Guide
February 2, 2009
The Media’s Middle East Rules of Engagement
Robin Miller, June 6, 2002
The media plays a crucial role in fashioning Americans’ attitudes toward the Middle East.
That role: to maintain a consensus supporting Israel.
And to keep Americans in the dark. According to a recent poll by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, only one quarter of Americans know that a majority of countries are more sympathetic to the Palestinian position than to Israel’s, and only one in three are aware that more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the conflict.[1]
What are the rules that American mainstream media follow in order to produce these dramatic results?
Rule 1: See the Middle East through Israeli eyes.
This is crucial. Slavishly following Israeli terminological dictates, the March 29 Israeli invasion of the West Bank–although devastating Palestinian civil infrastructure, demolishing whole swathes of cities and leaving 200 dead–was merely an “incursion.” Israeli killings of Palestinian militants are “targeted killings” rather than assassinations, or, more accurate still, the work of death squads.
A smaller-scale military operation is described as a “concentrated campaign against terrorism,”[2] a “rolling police action,”[3] or in any other fashion that cleaves to the Israeli perspective.
To maintain the fiction of the Palestinians as the aggressors, only Israel “retaliates.”
January 25, 2009
Hasbara Spam Alert
Richard Silverstein, 9 Jan 2009
With Israel’s foreign ministry organising volunteers to flood news websites with pro-Israeli comments, Propaganda 2.0 is here
The hasbara brigade strikes again! You always hear about Israeli attempts at media manipulation. Everyone knows it’s going on but usually the process happens through cyber insurgents like those involved with Giyus (and its media monitoring software, Megaphone). Now, we know that the Israeli foreign ministry itself is orchestrating propaganda efforts designed to flood news websites with pro-Israel arguments and information.
A reader of my blog has received the following email which documents both the efforts and the agency that originated them. The solicitation to become a pro-Israel “media volunteer” also includes a list of media links which the ministry would like addressed by pro-Israel comments:
The nature of Israel is blended with butchery - An interview with Gilad Atzmon
January 25, 2009
Conversation with Gilad Atzmon, world-renowned Jazzist: Bring justice to the Israeli criminals, today!
Interview by: Kourosh Ziabari, MMN
Gilad Atzmon is unique in his stance, unprecedented in his voice and unequivocal in his statements. As an Israel-born jazz musician and anti-Zionist activist, he propagates and chants his anti-Israeli contemplations explicitly and once he finds the opportunity.
As a musician who plays soprano, tenor and baritone saxophones, clarinet, sol, zurna and flute, Atzmon has won several international awards so far, including the BBC Jazz Award 2003, and is considered as one of the most prosperous artists of his rank.
In the position of an anti-Zionist activist, despite being Israeli originally, Gilad Atzmon incessantly denounces his belonging to the Jewish state and proclaims that he merely was born there and no more, which was perceptibly out of his knack and election, and that he feels no sympathy, compassion or nostalgia toward the occupying state of Israel.
Israel Faces the Gaza Aftermath: From self-deception to self-destruction
Dan Lieberman, January 25, 2009
Digging through the pulverized ruins of Gaza revealed the extent of damage to the Palestinian community. Still not revealed are exact reasons for Israel’s attack, its sudden willingness to halt the damage and what awaits a shaken Middle East in the future. Clues that contradict the given reason for the attack - rockets hitting Israeli soil - are:
- Rockets have been hitting southern Israel since 2002,
- The initial rocket barrage caused no casualties, and
- The intensive emphasis on the rocket attacks as the reason for Israel’s overly aggressive counterpunch, with almost all Israelis and foreign newspapers reciting that theme, seemed too arranged, more like concerted propaganda, and an attempt to divert attention from more valid explanations.
Regardless of the conflicting views of events, an inevitable drift to war was set in motion for one overriding reason; Israel, International institutions and western nations refused to talk with Hamas.
A legitimately elected government requested halts to a punishing blockade and to attacks on its citizens in the West Bank and Gaza. Silence. More pleading and more silence. Finally militants fire an uncontrollable a salvo of rockets, positioned so no fatalities could occur; alerting Israel and a complacent world that Hamas could no longer permit its people to be starved into surrender.
January 19, 2009
Zionism in Gaza’s Shattered Mirror
Shahid Alam, 14 January 2009
At a time when Palestinian men, women and children, corralled in the ghetto of Gaza since 1948, are daily, hourly, relentlessly, being bombed from the air, land and sea, it is instructive to turn to some of the founding fathers of Zionism, and ask what they might have thought about this obscene consequence of their messianic vision.
In the writings of these founding fathers, the Palestinians rarely merit even a passing reference. You can pore through one of the earliest statements of the Zionist credo, Moses Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem, but you will find not a single reference to ‘Muslims’ or ‘Arabs.’ Twice, the word ‘Palestinian’ enters this venerated text; the first time, it appears in connection with the training of Jewish youth for the “life of a Palestinian farmer;’ and the second refers to the ‘Jerushalmi Palestinian Talmud Sanhedrin.’ Palestine always exists, inscribed on some divine tablet, as Israeli land; but there are no Palestinians.
Gaza: The Media Coverage
Yvonne Ridley, 8 January 2009
The media coverage of the war in Gaza by Western television companies is largely unfair and biased because of a refusal to show viewers the real images of the victims.
One of the reasons for this is Israel’s decision not to allow the Western media in to Gaza.
In addition to this outrageous censorship by a so-called democracy, we get the usual arguments that most of the images shown by the Arab media are too shocking to show the viewing public in the West.
Admittedly, the horrific clip sent to me of a child’s head lying detached, among debris in Gaza did make me gasp.
But this is war and this is real and if the Western media did show these sort of images may be the general public would wake up to the full horrors of what happens when bombs are dropped on civilian populations.
No Other Option?!
Sam Bahour, January 12th, 2009
I watch in shock, like the rest of the world, at the appalling death and destruction being wrought on Gaza by Israel; and still it does not stop. Meanwhile, we see a seemingly never-ending army of well-prepared Israeli war propagandists, some Israeli government officials, and many other people self-enlisted for the purpose, explaining to the world the justifications for pulverizing the Gaza Strip, with its 1.5 million inhabitants. Curious about how Israel, or any society for that matter, could justify a crime of such magnitude against humanity, I turned to my Jewish Israeli friends today to hear their take on things. One after another, the theme was the same. The vast majority of Jewish Israelis has apparently bought into the state-sponsored line that Israel was under attack and had no other option available to stop Hamas’ rockets. More frightening is the revelation that many Israelis-including one person who self-identifies as a former “peace activist”-are speaking of accepting the killing of 100,000 or more Palestinians, if need be.
I have a problem with this logic.
When Jews got a State, Gaza got Oppression
11 January 2009, Mohammed Elmasry
It’s almost impossible to imagine a time when Gaza did not look like the disheveled, ravaged and burning wasteland we see every day in media photos and news video reports. But civilization in fact owes much to Gaza and her people.
In 570 CE a pilgrim to the Holy Land wrote that “Gaza is a splendid city, full of pleasant things; the men in it are most honest, distinguished by every generosity, and warm to friends and visitors.”
At that time, Gaza City was a jewel along the Palestinian coast, the last outpost of civilization and supplies for travelers facing an arduous and unforgiving trek through the Sinai desert down to Egypt.