Middle East

Events relevant to the Arab and Middle East region

Why This News Junkie is Boycotting CNN

Categories Middle East, News and Events, USA

I’ve been deemed a news junkie by family and friends for many years. In one seating, I’ll switch between CNN and Aljazeera while reading local news and news blogs online while getting alerts on my Blackberry for specific stories I’m following. Almost every day, another news media has showed its biased ways. This time around belonged to CNN.

Octavia Nasr has been with CNN for 20 years as the Middle Eastern Affairs Senior Editor. She was the reason behind CNN’s ability to report on Iran’s elections last year. She has always been the primary go to person for Rick Sanchez, Anderson Cooper and others on CNN whenever reporting on anything Middle East arose. The importance of her work and friendly demeanor has granted her a mass following on Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

Last weekend, Nasr tweeted:

“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot. #Lebanon”

That tweet has since been removed and replaced with:

“Regret tweet about Fadlallah death bc I didn’t explain specific respect for standing up for Muslim women. http://bit.ly/adrp95“

The link takes you to her CNN blog where Nasr not only explains why she had some “respect” for Fadlallah but also apologizes for her “error in judgement” when it came to her former tweet. However, that blog came in response to the anti-anything-pro-Arab-and/or-Muslim-without-any-form-of-understanding right winged fanatics who immediately bashed CNN over her “biased” tweet. They seem to have forgotten her work and contributions to the American and international media on the issues involving the Middle East. They also seem to have either forgotten or cared less to remember that Fadlallah was not part of Hezbollah. He was pushed out by the group for his “moderate” views and disagreement on many of their ideologies. Nasr’s feelings was simply in relation to the things they did agree on, especially when it came to women’s rights.

Of course, that doesn’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter that the Lebanese people voted for Hezbollah in their parliament; the Palestinian people voted for Hamas to govern Gaza and are now suffering the consequences of acting upon their right to vote.

Personally, I don’t agree with either group or most of their ideologies. However, who am I to tell a people how to vote, how to believe, what to speak or what to think? The line between speaking your mind (with respect of course) and being politically correct has some how vanished.

The fact is, if we don’t like them, we deem them as terrorists and forbid anyone to think of them as otherwise. Yet if we like them, we deem them as friends and forbid anyone to think of them as otherwise. Now that’s what I call, “freedom of speech!”

According to CNN’s internal memo posted by Mediaite yesterday, it was agreed that Nasr is “to leave the company”. For CNN to advertise that they are a network that showcases all points of views, firing Nasr contradicts just that. To basically do to Nasr what Hearst did to Helen Thomas is absurd and simply stupid. Just like the Hearst lost me as a reader, CNN has lost me as a long time viewer.

Other Sources:

Octavia Nasr’s Twitter Page

Salon – 8 July 2010

MEDIAite – 7 July 2010

NY Times – 7 July 2010

NY Times – 8 July 2010

Gaza Freedom March

Categories Middle East, News and Events

On Thursday, December 31, 2009 is the Gaza Freedom March happening from 2-2pm at the Golden Gate Bridge.

Park and meet at the south end of the bridge parking lot and march together across the bridge. We will end the year by marching alongside the Palestinian people of Gaza in a non-violent demonstration that breaches the illegal blockade.

See you all there!

Israel is Suppressing a Secret it Must Face

Categories Middle East, News and Events

Previously Posted Friday, 02 May 2008
Israel is Suppressing a Secret it Must Face
by Johann Hari

With all that has been happening lately in regards to the Israeli settlements, I just had to repost this article from last year by Johann Hari on the issue of sewage from these settlements onto Palestinian land… Sadly, it seems nothing is improving, peace is missing it’s bus to arrive to the end of these many conflicts.

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Johann Hari: Israel is suppressing a secret it must face

How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago end up throwing filth at cowering Palestinians?

Monday, 28 April 2008

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I’m still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer’s, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can’t do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: “Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn’t act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time…” He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting “the wrong way”, the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing “a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions”.

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be “a light unto the nations” end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land”. I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.

When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else’s country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”

So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – “a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres”. In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn’t we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don’t have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora’s desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.

Perhaps Hamas’ proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn’t it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Independent.co.uk

Kucinich’s Statement on Iraq

Categories Middle East, News and Events, Politics

…I just had to share this interesting statement made by Dennis Kucinich on June 30th as noted here

Kucinich: “Troop movement should not be confused with a troop withdrawal from Iraq”
Washington, Jun 30

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement regarding the announcement that U.S. troops have left the cities and towns of Iraq and turned over formal security to Iraqi security forces.

“The withdrawal of some U.S. combat troops from Iraq’s cities is welcome and long overdue news. However, it is important to remember that this is not the same as a withdrawal of U.S. troops and contractors from Iraq.

“U.S. troop combat missions throughout Iraq are not scheduled to end until more than a year from now in August of 2010. In addition, U.S. troops are not scheduled for a complete withdrawal for another two and a half years on December 31, 2011. Rather, U.S. troops are leaving Iraqi cities for military bases in Iraq. They are still in Iraq, and they can be summoned back at any time.

“This is not a great victory for peace. On May 19, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Iraqi and U.S. military officials virtually redrew the city limits of Baghdad in order to consider the Army’s Forward Operating Base Falcon as outside the city, despite every map of Baghdad clearly showing it with in city limits. In fact, according to Section 24.3 of the “SOFA” U.S. troops can remain at any agreed upon facility. The reported reason for this decision is to ensure U.S. troops are able to ‘help maintain security in south Baghdad along what were the fault lines in the sectarian war.’

“This troop movement should not be confused with a troop withdrawal from Iraq. In reality, this is a small step toward Iraqi sovereignty as Iraqi security forces begin assuming greater control over security operations, but it is a long way from independence and a withdrawal of the U.S. military presence.”

The Unmentionable Evils, Muslim & Arab

Categories Islam, Middle East, News and Events, Politics

After following this election for almost a year and a half now, a few things seem to bother me enough that after being away from writing, I feel more then ever to start writing again; starting with the forgotten perspective, the Muslim Arab American perspective. So here I go, starting fresh by writing this piece…

As much as this election has excited me, it has really irritated me. Why?

I’m a Muslim Arab American lady, born and raised in San Francisco to immigrant parents who came to live the American Dream (or may I say everyone’s dream for that matter). Now if I decide to run for public office to give back to this great nation, I’d get that questionable look. Ever since the launch of the presidential primaries, it seems that the first two of the four characteristics I’ve listed would make me a questionable candidate.

About a week ago, an angry lady at a McCain/Palin rally insisted that she read about Obama, on how she “doesn’t trust him” because “he’s an Arab.” How does McCain respond? He responds, and I quote, “No ma’am, no ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. That’s what this campaign is all about. He’s not, thank you.”

Oh McCain, I’m a decent citizen that also disagrees with you on many fundamental issues. Add to that Muslim and Arab, does that change my decent citizen factor?

Campbell Brown of CNN asked recently, “So what if Obama was Arab or Muslim? So what if John McCain was Arab or Muslim? Would it matter?”

No Brown, it wouldn’t matter. Yet to many McCain/Palin supporters it matters. Most of their supporters only support them due to Obama’s supposed race or religion. I mean how many times does the man have to state that he is neither Muslim nor Arab? How many times does he have to denounce the two as if they are unmentionable evils? How many times does he have to be offended of being called such words as if he was being called the “N” word? Will it soon be that Muslim will be the “M” word and Arab will be the “A” word?

The anger I’ve noticed coming out of this election is beyond belief that I have to keep checking the calendar to make sure we are in the 21st century! It has taken us as a nation way too long to get to where we are today. I think if anything, we are behind in our times to get to where we are today.

Just recently outside a McCain/Palin rally in Virginia, there was a group of individuals pushing a hateful agenda against Obama and “his Islamic ties.” I was glad to hear that not only several Muslim supporters of McCain/Palin, but non Muslim supporters stood up against this group until they walked off. Even a campaign director of the area that happened to be Muslim assured McCain/Palin supporters that that group was not with the campaign nor supported the campaign’s message.

As I applaud those who did not tolerate such angry ignorance, I still blame the leaders (which have been mainly GOP) that instilled this fear in such individuals to begin with! How much fear has to be instilled in us before we realize that a handful of “fundamentalists” don’t define what is Muslim or Arab? How much ignorance must we suffer before we decide to educate ourselves on what is Muslim, what is Arab?

If being Muslim and/or Arab is such an evil thing, then we are all basking in its evilness. Let me remind you oh great nation of just some of the major contributions that come from the unmentionable evils:

  • Much of the math that we study in our courses today such as Algebra and Trigonometry was introduced by Arabs. Yes, that includes 0 (zero), Arabic numerals and the reformation of the calendar! With mathematics, comes the understanding of calculating of time, degrees, longitudes and latitudes… oh, Astronomy!
  • Navigation and geography was just as important when Muslims developed them to better calculate and find the direction in which they are to pray in (ElQiblah as it is known). This includes the compass and the magnetic needle.
  • A faith that brought upon literature, poetry, philosophy and music to name a few, brings upon the inspiring designs such as many of today’s architecture across the world, including the many holy sites all of us faithfuls respect and worship in today.
  • Let me also add to this list much scientific studies and discoveries, medicines, alternative health treatments, engineering and craftsmanship.

To end my rant, I’d like to assure you all that you may say the words “Muslim” and “Arab.” I mean for crying out loud, Harry Potter mentions the unmentionable evil name of Lord Voldemort and he doesn’t get stuck by lighting! Ok he gets struck by a wand but he still lived!

Sources:
http://www.CNN.com
http://www.ADC.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com