The Australian Committee for Truth in the Middle East, a group with a fine pedigree, offers some advice to journalists covering the Middle East: 1. In Gaza and the West Bank Hamas won popular support – enough to win an election generally regarded in the West as fair (except for the result, of course) –…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
Removing “normality” from the Middle East
Why boycott, divest and sanction Israel? The Electronic Intifada provides some answers: …Veterans of the South Africa anti-apartheid campaign who led a successful boycott have also stressed the need to stand with indigenous communities. Boycott is a move to heed the voice of an oppressed group and follow its lead. The idea is that there…
How attractive is conflict to the New York Times?
The New York Times was intimately involved in selling the case for war against Iraq. Six years on, with Iran in the cross-hairs, little has changed. Corporate and complicit media at its worst.
Where the lessons of Iraq are ignored over Iran
The growing hysteria over Iran is deafening (details here, here,… here and here.). Watch this segment on the “liberal” MSNBC and see how the American media elite (including Arianna Huffington, just back from a little trip to Israel) are almost gagging to bomb the Islamic Republic. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald is a notable voice of reason:
We broke Iraq
The Iraqi shoe thrower, Muntazer al-Zaidi, eloquently explains why he committed the act: I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the…
America says it is good and true and the globe laughs
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on the inherent delusions of the American corporate media and posits: the world looks at us with contempt and slams the exceptionalist mindset: I’m asking this sincerely, not rhetorically:… is there anything other than extreme self-delusion, grounded in blinding self-regard… (i.e., self-decreed exceptionalism), that can explain this?… … The Washington Post Editorial Page today is…
What are soldiers really doing in Iraq and Afganistan?
An important editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review on the need for journalists to report fairly and deeply into wars fought in our name: General William Tecumseh Sherman, like a number of military leaders through history, despised journalists. Tom Curley, president and CEO of The Associated Press, noted in a recent speech that a reporter…
US liberation brings web crackdown to Iraq
Internet censorship is rife across the Middle East, issues I discuss in my book, The Blogging Revolution. Now, six years after the fall of Saddam, Iraq may be going in a similar direction:
Iraq’s oil is attractive to all
It’s long been argued that oil was a key reason behind the Iraq war. Western multinationals are central in this campaign but, as the New York Times reports today, we shouldn’t forget the role of the leading Communist nation: When China’s biggest oil company signed the first post-invasion oil field development contract in Iraq last…
When killing Iranians is your primary Jewish goal
The singular aim of Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick (a woman with form) is depressingly lacking in foresight, originality, morality or legality: What can Israel do to prevent Iran from further expanding its nuclear capacity and block it from emerging as a nuclear power? The answer to this question is the same as it has…