Conflict in Israel/Palestine: How the Establishment Media Distorts Reality

I subscribe to Jewish Peace News, which I believe provides an important perspective, and a truly critical analysis, on some of the current issues surrounding the states of Palestine and Israel. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is one of the most pressing issues of the day. These are two different groups of people who are each struggling, albeit in different ways and for different purposes. It is essential, for a just resolution of the conflict, to have access to the most complete set of information possible, and to represent the reality on the ground truthfully and accurately. The portrayal of the conflict in news stories and articles must strive toward objectivity, and it must keep away from promoting the agenda of one of either of the groups - for example, by omitting relevant facts and details. The following is from JPN:

An article yesterday (June 30) in the New York Times included this update on the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza: “The deal, mediated by Egypt, has been violated by dissident Palestinian groups that have fired rockets or mortar shells at Israel.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/world/middleeast/30mideast.html)

The following news item gives an account of other violations, most of which came from Israel and most of which preceded the rocket attack on Sderot on June 24th.

Judith Norman


UN: Israel violated truce 7 times in one week
By: Roi Mandel
Ynet
27 June 2008

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/1,7340,L-3560972,00.html

Since it went into effect last week, at least eight violations of the new ceasefire agreement with Hamas and the Palestinian factions have been recorded, a UN source told Ynet on Thursday [June 26th]. According to the source, seven violations were committed by the IDF, while the Palestinians are responsible for just one.

However the UN report does not include the Qassam fire launched towards the Negev during the day. ‘It is important that both sides honor the ceasefire, in order for it to be the first constructive step towards a wider and more extensive peace process between the sides,’ the source said.

Most of the offences committed by the IDF include shots fired by soldiers at Palestinian farmers attempting to reach their land near the border security fence. According to the UN, on June 20 an IDF patrol shot at Palestinian farmers near the fence east of Rafah. The soldiers fired for ten minutes in order to drive the farmers away, but no injuries were reported.
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Severn Suzuki Address to UN Conference on Environment and Development 1992

Teenager speaks for future generations before the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1992.

There are some choice quotes from this youngster's 6 minute speech, check it out:



http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html

Here are a couple of quotes:

"I am only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on finding environmental answers, ending poverty, and finding treaties what a wonderful place this Earth would be." – Severn Suzuki

"At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us to not fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share - not be greedy: then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?" – Severn Suzuki

[June 30, 2008: ...a "team of scientists has shown in recent months that the peril is global, concluding that all but two of 21 species of open-ocean sharks and their cousins, the rays, are facing the risk of extinction. Another found that the decline of sharks at the top of the food chain is disrupting marine ecosystems around the globe."
source: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901783_pf.html
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and
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"The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose "imminent and substantial" dangers to public health and the environment.

The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country. The contracts would spell out a remediation plan, set schedules, and allow the EPA to oversee the work and assess penalties if milestones are missed.

... source: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901977_pf.html \June 30, 2008]

Still Looking for WMD in Iraq

Why did the US invade Iraq? Wasn't it because Iraq posed a threat to US National Security via WMD? Well no WMD has been found in over four years of occupation. The chances of finding a significant enough cache that might have threatened the US is getting smaller by the day.

We already heard (via the Downing Street Memo) how the facts were being fixed to the policy of invading Iraq. It looks more and more like WMD was simply one of those "facts" that grew out of a fiction. And it was used, in violation of the public trust, to justify invading Iraq. In that light, the invasion was an attack - an aggressive invasion - an belligerent act of war.

Hideous. Read about the continuing mission to discover WMD in Iraq:

go to original

Though Work Is Seen as Irrelevant, Security Council Can't Agree to End It

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 2, 2007; A01

UNITED NATIONS -- More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan's East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for stories on Hussein's deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for inspections in Iraq -- inspections they will almost certainly never conduct, in search of weapons that few believe exist.

The inspectors acknowledge that their chief task -- disarming Iraq -- was largely fulfilled long ago. But, they say, their masters at the U.N. Security Council have been unable to agree to either shut down their effort or revise their mandate to make their work more relevant. Russia insists that Iraq's disarmament must be formally confirmed by the inspectors, while the United States vehemently opposes a U.N. role in Iraq, saying coalition inspectors have already done the job.

"I recognize this is unhealthy," said Dimitri Perricos, a Greek weapons expert who runs the team, known as the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and manages its $10 million annual budget. But, he added, "we are not the ones who are holding the purse; the one who is holding the purse is the council."

There was a time when the work of U.N. weapons inspectors on Iraq was the stuff of front-page news and impassioned speeches by world leaders. President Bush even argued that Hussein's refusal to cooperate with U.N. inspectors offered legal backing for the 2003 invasion.

But the inspectors' primary mission -- ridding Hussein's regime of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons -- has become irrelevant since a U.S.-led coalition toppled the Iraqi leader and discovered that his government had destroyed its most lethal weapons shortly after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"The reality on the ground is there is no WMD there," said Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector who published the landmark 2004 report of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, which concluded that Iraq's weapons had been destroyed. "I think they understand the distance their work is from reality."
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