Last night Charlie Rose asked Fawaz Gerges about the new Arab public opinion and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He said:
Israel and the United States really are making a major strategic mistake, to underestimate, that deep down-- yes the focus [of the Arab spring is] on domestic politics, but once the dust settles-- the Palestinian conflict remains the most fundamental question, identity question for Arabs and Muslims
The point is underlined by a beautiful report by Kelly McEvers on NPR the other day about Bassel Shahade, a young filmmaker killed Monday in Homs-- by Syrian government shells.
Bassel Shahade from Shaam News Network
Shahade had the best of the west. He was a Fulbright scholar at Syracuse University, studying film. But he left because he needed to see the Syrian liberation. McEvers:
friends say he just couldn't deal with the guilt that nearly everyone he knew was back in Syria, fighting and sometimes dying for what they believed would be a better country. Shehadeh quit the program and made his way back home again.
Our NPR colleague, Rima Marrouch, met him around that time.
"And he told me, 'I couldn't be away when the revolution is happening. I needed to come back. You can always study later,' " Marrouch says.
Then McEvers ended her piece by talking about a film Shahade made, below.
Perhaps one of the most moving things Shahade ever made was a short poem of a film called Saturday Morning Gift.
It's based on interviews he did with a boy who survived war between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah in 2006.
The film is a dramatization of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006. It pictures a young Lebanese boy who is afraid of airplanes-- and whose home is struck by an Israeli shell. The soundtrack is Miles Davis.
Props to McEvers for highlighting Shahade's work, and to NPR for running it. There is no contradiction between supporting human rights in Syria and in Palestine.
what a sad sad story. what an incredible film.
Q: … a young filmmaker killed Monday in Homs– by Syrian government shells.
R: I’m very sorry about the untimely loss of yet another young life. However, with so many players in this evil game I’d be very reluctant to blame one side or another without concrete proof. See result of google search about recent bombardments of Homs link to google.com
or
link to aljazeera.com
Killing and murder are despicable acts of violence, regardless who does it or where it’s done.
Where are the film makers that show just how normal life is in cities like Ramallah and Jenin and many others? Happy kids, learning at schools, playing sports and leaning to play an instrument. Not good for the propaganda I suppose?
“Where are the film makers that show just how normal life is in cities like Ramallah and Jenin and many others?”
Yeah, maybe they can show how “normal” life is in the caged in streets in Hebron, or how “normal” it is to be oppressed, tortured and killed by some foreign Jewish stormtrooper occupying the land of Palestine.
Can’t speak for the provenance of this but it has the ring of truth:
First interview with an eyewitness of the Houla massacre
The following text is the translation of a blog entry of the ANNA News journalist Marat Musin, who was in the region of al-Houla (Houla/Hula – near the Syrian city of Homs) last week and who has own experiences how the horrible “Houla massacre” in Syria happened and who is behind the violent and horrible massacre near Homs.
link to fromthetrenchesworldreport.com
If only the U.S. were truly concerned about human rights in Syria. But anyone who knows the U.S.’s business in that part of the world knows that is not the truth.
People in that part of the world find it absurd that leaders in the U.S. responsible for thousands of deaths in Iraq based on a “pack of lies” which many people around the world consider a “massacre” or Israeli leaders or those in the I lobby are lecturing Syrian leaders about human rights etc. Why is it that these same U.S. leaders and MSM host, Israeli leaders, I lobby are calling what is happening in Syria a “massacre” yet either ignore the dead, injured and displaced in Iraq due to the U.S. invasion or refer to the dead in Iraq or from U.S. drones as “collateral damage” Or the innocent that Israel has “massacred” Why is it that as soon as innocent people in Syria have been brutally killed the images and numbers of dead immediately make it up on U.S. MSM outlets like MSNBC etc yet these same outlets never showed images of Iraqi dead or never ever report about the numbers killed in Iraq or by U.S. drones?
Former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit has a few things to say about the Syrian situation
link to non-intervention.com
“Washington’s threat mongering about Syria for a long time had to do with both parties’ readiness to earn campaign donations by towing the anti-Syria propaganda line put forth by Israel and its AIPAC-led fifth column of U.S. citizens. (NB:Ironically, AIPAC’s deliberate corruption of the U.S. Congress and political system has always been a far greater threat to America than Syria.) And, indeed, the Russia-armed Syrians may have posed a threat to Israel and its ongoing expansion into Palestinian-owned territory. But this was a threat to Israel, never a threat to the United States, although U.S. leaders have spoken and spent, and still speak and spend as if the Syrian marines — if there are any — were soon going to splash ashore along the Hamptons’ beaches and ruin the holidays of many cocaine-addled but campaign-contributing Hollywood celebrities.
Given the reliable ability of Israel and its U.S. fifth column to determine and control the content of U.S. policy in the Islamic world, the ersatz Syrian threat remained front and center until the Arab Spring unleashed a fatal dementia that is likely to destroy Israel and embroil the United States and its allies in a losing clash of civilizations with the Islamic world. This fatal dementia can be found in the words and — to give them the benefit of the doubt — the thoughts of Mrs. Clinton, Obama, Rice, McCain, Cameron, and Graham that assert the Arab Spring ensures the installation of secular democracy across the Arab and Islamic worlds. Although Islamic parties have won all of the elections since the Tunisian regime fell — and Egyptians are poised to choose between Islamists on the one side, and the army and Mubarak‘s assistant tyrants on the other — Mrs. Clinton still insists that secular democracy is on the march. And it is, but only in the reality-proof brains of the Secretary of State and other of our Ivy-League educated (?) political and media leaders.”
“It’s based on interviews he did with a boy who survived war between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah in 2006.”
Beautiful. But I must quibble with that sentence, it was a war by Israel against the people of Southern Lebanon.
U.S. policy viz-a-viz Syria comes out of Riyadh.
“the Palestinian conflict remains the most fundamental question, identity question for” a billion plus Muslims in the world, sure thing.
in 2006 Hezbollah killed/kidnapped three Israeli soldiers but Israel was the one on the “attack”, sure thing again.
Israel has killed/kidnapped literally thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians from Lebanon over a period of less than ten years -but I wouldn’t expect that that would mean anything to you, judging from your silly comment…
Israel was the one on the “attack”, sure thing again
israel had just kidnapped 2 brothers from gaza the week before. they perpetually hold people in ‘administrative detention’ which is essentially kidnapping them. israel is always on the attack. hezbollah was trying to hold some of their soldiers to trade which they have done in the past. israel knew this. israel wanted to get their war on, they had been planning it. this has already been revealed, just as they planned the gaza massacre. so we are all hip to this hasbara you’ve got running here. the poor israel is the victim routine and they just had to get their war on. phff.