RedBedHead: Beyond Craven: The Globe's Gaza "Expose" <read me!
Every article about the school bombing that I could find, names the school al Fakhura - somehow the Globe came up with the name "Ibn Rushd Preparatory School for Boys". One wonders if the reporter was in the wrong place entirely.
Silent as the Tomb: Another American-Backed Slaughter Ignored | Chris Floyd Online - Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the American Imperium < Read the full post.
Before taking office, Barack Obama was chided -- in certain quarters, at least -- for his long silence on the slaughter in Gaza. Of course, as we noted here the other day, the main reason he stayed mum on the subject before his inauguration was that he was in complete accord with George W. Bush's stance on the American-backed massacre of civilians.
However, there is another horrific, American-backed slaughter that Obama has been silent about for even longer -- throughout his entire presidential campaign, in fact, and continuing into his presidency. We speak, of course, of the ghastly Terror War "regime change" operation in Somalia, where American bombs, American weapons, American training, American money -- and American death squads -- aided the military forces of the Ethiopian dictatorship in its brutal invasion and murderous occupation of the long-shattered land. [For more background, see this, especially the links at the bottom.]
Another Point of View: Reloaded: Death Of Free Internet In Canada? < read me!
The great value of the open Internet is that it allows us to envision and, in fact, produce a more democratic media system.
But the open Internet is under threat by the very companies that bring it into our homes and workplaces, Internet Service Providers (ISPs). These big telecommunication companies want to become the gatekeepers of the Internet, charging hefty fees to reach large audiences, as they do with other mediums.
Big telecom companies are trying to do away with the governing guidelines of the Internet called "net neutrality" (or "common carriage"). Net neutrality requires that Internet service providers not discriminate - including speeding up or slowing down web content - based on its source, ownership or destination. Net neutrality protects our ability to direct our own online activities, and also maintains a level playing field for online innovation and social change.
The activity of limiting or slowing access to specific content and services is referred to as "traffic shaping" or "throttling," and it fundamentally changes how the Internet works. According to Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, ISPs already have a "history of blocking access to contentious content (Telus), limiting bandwidth for alternative content delivery channels (Rogers), and raising the prospect of levying fees for priority content delivery (Bell)."
If we let big ISPs have their way, media producers, online entrepreneurs and social change makers will need to ask Bell, Rogers and other big ISPs for permission and pay large sums of cash to effectively distribute content or innovate.
Middle East OnlinePACIFICA – About 700 Israelis have been arrested for protesting against the war on Gaza since the beginning of the deadly offensive, said Neve Gordon, chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel on Monday.
"700 Israelis have been arrested since this war began, because they protested this war. This has not made it to an international media, and it’s an act of intimidation by the state against those who protest the war," Gordon told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!.
On the number of Israeli deaths, Gordon said: "between ten and twenty people, Israelis, have died from rockets in the eight years that rockets have been launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel. During the same amount of time, 4,000 Israelis have died from car accidents."
But Israel still used that as an excuse to bomb Gaza.
PEACE, PROPAGANDA & THE PROMISED LAND | U.S. Media & The Israeli-Palestinian ConflictPeace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites -- oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others -- work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.
Read the synopsis, watch or download the video.
Sudbury Against War and Occupation: Turn off the Canadian Media, Please <READ ME!
If national media help make a nation, then we all need to stop reading and listening to conventional Canadian media if we want to make a decent Canada. Benedict Anderson, perhaps the leading scholar of nationalism, wrote that the daily newspaper (along with other innovations like novels, maps, censuses, museums) played a key role in creating national consciousness. People in a country like Canada use their own media - public (CBC) and private (CanWest, TorStar, CTVglobemedia) - to know what is happening in their own country. Media are also an important part of forging a national identity. They are supposed to represent the broad spectrum of Canadian opinion. When they present information on the rest of the world, they do so from a Canadian perspective and have the Canadian audience in mind.
And today, if you want to have the first idea what is happening in Israel/Palestine (or most of the rest of the world), the best thing to do would be to turn them off completely.
In the face of a major ongoing crime like that of Israel's siege and assault on Gaza, Canadians turn to the Canadian media in good faith to try to learn and understand what is happening, who is to blame, and what they might be able to do to help the victims. On each of these counts, the Canadian media fails. But the days when Canadians would be stuck listening to local radio, picking up the local print newspaper, or watching local television packaged by Canadian media corporations for their consumption are over. There is, for the time being, media choice. And given the choice, on Israel/Palestine, it would be foolish to turn to the Canadian media.
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