Rachel Maddow Worse than you think
& Israeli piracy & murder on the high seas
Rachel Corrie the next ship whose fate rested with the IDF
Rachel Maddow after going to the Gulf area to see how bad it was found out it is much worse than is being reported
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow: This Isn't Katrina; It's America's Own Mega-Disaster. We Own It
see Rachel Maddow videos on the impact of the spill on the Gulf's economy and its culture
Here's one clip from Rachel Maddow 's trip to the Gulf to see the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in person and up close she finds out it is worse than its being made out to be .
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Video by Mark Fiore/ Newsweek via Newsweek How to Punish BP Your most creative, incisive, and sadistic ideas for how to make the company suffer. June 2, 2020
The success of Israel's PR -when ships off of Somalia were boarded by armed men they called it piracy- when Israel does it they are defended.
BEYOND THE PALE - The murder of Furkan Dogan by Paul Jay of Real NewsNetwork, June 6, 2010
Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism.
But some is.
It cannot be overestimated how thousands of years of hatred and Nazi genocide weighs with a nightmarish grip on the psyche of Jews around the world.
The narrative that led to the foundation of Israel was built on the reality of the European onslaught against its Jewish population. Many of the early immigrants that fled to Israel were victims who had nowhere else to go.
Without doubt there are forces within Israel and outside of it that use this history to pursue economic and political power. They brandish 'Judenhass' (Jew Hatred) as an ideological weapon to suppress opposition. That being said, this fact does not diminish Jews' anguished memory of suffering from monumental barbarism.
While one cannot minimize the extent to which the German population either supported or looked away when heinous crimes were committed, any decent history of the period makes clear it was the German elites that helped create Hitler and he made them rich. He expropriated Jewish property and plundered the countries of Europe. Whether it was Jews or Slavs, racist ideology made it "acceptable". We dehumanize those we want to exploit or kill. We call them animals, vermin, rats, and parasites. We are human and you are, well, less human.
but then there is legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies and actions
Right Wing government of Israel rewrites history as it happens incapable of admitting to making mistakes they make up stuff that makes it worse
The Israeli 's successful PR as the Mass media accepted its version of events
Israeli PR machine won Gaza flotilla media battle by Antony Lerman via Guardian UK, June 4, 2010
Reporting by mainstream media on the Gaza flotilla attack was unbalanced and dominated by Israel's edited version of events
Soon after the commandos landed on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship carrying more than 600 of the activists, the live satellite broadcasts from the vessel were cut. From that point on, the Israeli authorities seized almost complete control of how evidence of what was taking place could be made public. Video of the last footage broadcast by the journalists on board was immediately available from sources such as al-Jazeera and the IHH (the Turkish Foundation for Freedoms and Human Rights and Humanitarian Relief), but it showed a very confusing picture: there were badly injured passengers, yet it was impossible to know how they had been injured.
This Israeli version of events was very often given an uncritical airing. The fact that the video was a selected and edited segment, that the activists who witnessed what happened were being held incommunicado, that every bit of recorded evidence they may have had in their possession was being confiscated – this context was rarely highlighted, with BBC online and radio coverage particularly weak in this respect.
Of course, the media were not responsible for the Israeli clampdown – which continued even after the activists began to be seen in public being taken into detention at the Israeli port of Ashdod and when they were being deported – but there could certainly have been more attention drawn to the imbalance in the sources from which the media were obtaining their information. Even after first-hand accounts started to be broadcast, there seemed to be a belittling of their validity by describing eye-witnesses simply as "activists" or "pro-Palestinians" when some were writers, members of parliament and journalists.
By late Tuesday afternoon, Israel had still not provided a list of names or locations of the injured; there was no official number or list of the deceased; no official count of the numbers of the detainees and their locations; no report on the legal status of the wounded at the IPS medical facility and at hospitals across the country and extremely limited access to the wounded. And those arrested, detained or in hospital were still being denied unrestricted access to lawyers, relatives and consular representatives.
But once the testimony of the activists became available and the blogosphere got its teeth into the visual evidence, from whatever source, an alternative picture quickly emerged and the mainstream media struggled to keep up.
Prior to the landing of the commandos, the boats were probably softened up with rubber bullets, smoke bombs, tear gas; the provenance is in question of pictures of weapons supposedly found on the boats and posted on Flickr by the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs; the Americans appeared to confirm that there was no evidence to suggest that IHH was a terrorist organisation with links to al-Qaida. And the Israeli army all but admitted that the activists did not have guns of their own before the raid.
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and so it goes,
GORD.
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