Pretty good piece on Israel's isolation by Aron Heller of AP, includes a lot about boycott, but includes this:
A small French cinema chain postponed a showing of an Israeli comedy and replaced it with a documentary about an American student crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer during a 2003 Gaza protest, drawing condemnations from some French newspapers and French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand.
I just wrote to Aron, asking him whether or not the name had been edited out subsequent to his having submitted his article. I’ll let you know what he says, should he write back.
Back in 2003, Joshua Hammer, in his MoJo article that was meant to be a final nail in Rachel Corrie’s coffin, wrote, “Corrie herself has faded into obscurity, a subject of debate in Internet chat rooms and practically nowhere else.”
I wrote to Hammer this spring, during the first phase of the Corries’ civil trial in Israel, asking him if he was considering doing an update on Corrie’s legacy, Rather than answering that, he stated that her family is good at keeping her legacy alive, and that he stood by the “facts” as presented in the 2003 article.
More on those “facts.”
I think another point to be made that was missing from the article is that the “documentary about an American student crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer”(‘Rachel’) was directed by French-Israeli Simone Bitton. In other words, the French cinema chain replaced an Israeli directed comedy with an Israeli directed documentary.
Reminds me of when I was unwittingly caught in the cross-fires of the Qana Massacre in 1986. Now I got out of there a few days later soon as Beirut International airport was opened and I went straight to London. Arriving there I was in a shell-shocked state from hearing too many explosions constantly day and night for four straight days, but what shocked me the MOST was turning CNN on in London on Saturday afternoon and finding no Breaking News coming out of the middle east at all – instead, CNN had programed a whole block of 4 hours of documentaries on the holocaust.
I can’t even tell you how sick to my stomach that made me feel.
And presently, as the truth of Israeli crimes is now front and centre of the media, zionists might want to understand that some europeans are very angry indeed at Israel, afterall they have family members who died in order to defeat Hitler and save the european jews, and what do they see now? euro-zionists committing the same repugnant evils.
It’s easy to dismiss european anti-semiticism, but not so easy to dismiss those europeans who have already paid with blood to help the euro jews.
I completely disagree Phil. The article is, as a whole, very misleading. It carefully uses its words to distort the reality of the situation and make it seem like the ISraelis are truly the reasonable ones.
Some quick examples:
“Musicians like Costello and the Pixies bowed to online pressure and canceled gigs in Israel. John was targeted as well, but vowed to play on.
”
IIRC, You posted Costello’s terse comments on why he wouldn’t play in Israel. For one reading those comments, its hard to say he simply bowed to “online pressure”, as if he had a desire to play in Israel, but it was the ‘activists’ that pressured him not to; no, he had a desire to play in Israel, but it was Israeli Action that convinced him he should not.
“But those efforts seem to have had little effect, and that, in turn, has led many Israelis to feel that getting a fair shake internationally has become a lost cause.
”
Again its building up the case that the Israelis are truly the reasonable ones. They aren’t getting the ‘fair shake’ against the deluge of condemnation that is described.
“”There is a point where even Israelis who are critical of their government say, ‘The world has gone mad and the fact that everyone thinks one thing doesn’t make it right,’” said Eytan Schwartz, an Israeli activist who launched a Facebook campaign to urge John not to cancel his appearance.
“We earned a lot of the criticism, but it is not about that,” he said. “This is about a double standard, about being hypocritical.”
”
See how the author takes it and says “Even the leftists in Israel, who want peace, think that they are being treated unfairly”.
By the time you are done reading the article, you think that the Israelis are truly reasonable and is this barely described enigmatic pressure is causing all these problems…whereas Israeli’s efforts are detailed in fun and light hearted youtube videos!
Absolutely. The article gives the impression that Israel’s intentions are good, but they just can’t get the PR right.
Ever hear of that fungus that drifts down from the forest canopy in the Amazon and takes over the brains of ants scuttling unawares across the forest floor? That’s AP.
I was surprised at the article’s tone. The flotilla participants’ activism and the disgusting Israeli response have really turned the tide, at least in the short term. I suppose we could nitpick. I suppose we could all write an article about this subject and get hammered for our biases in every paragraph if not sentence. Rachel Corrie’s name may be absent, but the description of her being crushed to death may be harsher with no name: “an American student.”
It seems the thesis of the article is that Israel is in crisis due to international isolation, that it is their fault, and they know it. (But it’s going to be hard for them to change.)
Both ap and yahoo have been collaborating together to promote racism. Ahmed Amr has now published several articles on yahoo/ap manipulations that promote racism. The latest is:
Yahoo Spreads Hate Speech to Main Street
by Ahmed Amr / June 18th, 2010
link to dissidentvoice.org